Boris are definitely a ‘state of mind’ band, so listening to their new album while sat at my desk on a cold, damp Monday morning may not be totally conducive to full appreciation, but none the less it makes quite an impression.
‘Smile’ opens with the gut-wobbling bass assault that is ‘Message’ which sounds disturbingly like The Rolling Stones locked in a recording studio with a thunder storm & a train wreck and the aural onslaught doesn’t let up from there all the way through.
Dissonance is the Boris stock in trade and it is displayed here in spades, but amongst the vast oceans of distortion and feedback is also a surprising amount of melody that rises to the surface at choice moments., ‘Flower Sun Rain’ is almost a ballad although with the lyrics being in Japanese it could actually be about slaughtering kittens for all I know!
But anyway, back to the dissonance because that’s what we all buy Boris records for isn’t it and boy they do it better than almost anyone else? They are master producers of extreme distortion and somehow avoid everything being sucked down in to a mush of white noise. On ‘Next Saturn’ and ‘Dead Destination’ the noise ebbs & flows around some pretty coherent melodies, but it is on ‘You Were Holding An Umbrella’ that the band really explode. Split in to two distinct halves, the first being a gentle lilt that then descends via the seven circles of hell in to a blistering bass distortion-fest.
For fans of quality noise everywhere.
Top Tracks : ‘You Were Holding An Umbrella’, ‘Message’.
Released 29/04/08 on Southern Lord Reocrds