High Diving Ponies: Suspended in Liquid

High Diving Ponies combines the distortion and noise of My Bloody Valentine with the powerfully catchy sensibilities of Hum — but that’s a quick, cheap and ultimately facile assessment. On its latest, Suspended in Liquid, the Kansas City band sketches a hypnotic background throughout that manages not to sound like just a series of experiments in sonic oddity. Where High Diving Ponies really succeeds is in convincingly harnessing all that drone, fuzz and reverb inside honest-to-goodness guitar-based rock and roll. Rarely does anything but a jangling guitar stand alone, turning songs like “Everything Takes Forever” into one big wall of sound. The tones on Suspended in Liquid are mostly warm, though. Listening is not unlike playing inside the padded walls of a bounce house: fun, entertaining and no fear of injury.
(self-released)