What's best, the trio doesn't give up on its heavy metal experience though this album suggests a stylistic mix of new wave and Mazzy Star, Boris play with the rumble and roar of a loud rock band. There's a ruminative instrumental for acoustic guitar, and "Spoon", a blustery tumble that- Wata's willowy vocals aside- favorably suggests the sound of 1990s American modern rock radio. During "See You Next Week", she drifts like a ghost between a world of broken drum machines and guitars meant more for texture than melody. Sure, she leads the band through several different looks, from the tense, pretty opening title track to the dance-metal anthem "Party Boy". Her consistent presence offers an atmosphere of patience, plus a cohesiveness that Boris have long since foregone. For the first time in the band's long run, Wata takes lead vocal. Here, it's all offered like a mixtape, with no narrative arch or musical momentum.Īttention Please at least offers something fresh for Boris. For fans of Boris, the material is a double-edged sword: It's the sort of motley metal that brought you to the fold one way or another, but that means you've already heard it- all of it, from the massive soundscapes on Pink to the dynamic sizzle in Amplifier Worship- several times before. "Missing Pieces" alternates between spare guitar drift, gnarls of noise, and an epically forlorn crescendo, while the other 12-minute-plus tune, "Aileron", growls and swells before drifting off into a piano-and-distortion haze. Heavy Rocks does the things you expect a Boris album to do: It explodes open with "Riot Sugar", a brutal blues-metal march with a rote, ragged riff and background grunts from the Cult's Ian Astbury. Heavy Rocks was sturdier back in 2002, while the appropriately titled Attention Please- even if the more interesting of these two discs- is a flimsy showcase for Boris guitarist Wata as a would-be college-rock frontwoman. But riddled as this pair of albums is with confounding musical indecision and listless stylistic repetition, they mostly serve as reminders of how remarkable and inventive Boris have been and often threaten to be. This moment, then, is not only Boris' look-how-popular-we-are exclamation but also their look-how-much-we've-grown assertion essentially, Attention Please and Heavy ( Heavier?) Rocks are logical next steps for the Boris legacy. What's more, this is the second Boris LP to sport the title Heavy Rocks the first was released in 2002, and nearly a decade later, it still stands as one of Boris' best efforts, a landmark distillation of stoner metal and noise rock built with enviable precision and aggression. If that's their plan, it's largely worked.Īccordingly, there are few release-day gestures more rock star than issuing two albums at the same time, as Boris will do with the slight electropop-and-shoegaze departure Attention Please and the requisite metal grab bag Heavy Rocks. All of this seems to be part and parcel to Boris' methodical quest to build a legacy of expansive, new heavy music, where no form is too sacred to break, no idea too mainstream to incorporate. From former labelmates Sunn O))) to fellow Japanese sonic explorers Merzbow and Keiji Haino, they've also collaborated with a long list of experimental luminaries. Michio Kurihara, one of the world's best psychedelic guitarists, works as Boris' touring sideman. They're the band with Atsuo- the screaming, gong-banging drummer with one of those arena-rock, hands-off microphones- and Takeshi, a multi-instrumentalist who plays a double-necked guitar so often and well that it doesn't seem like an affectation. In the past 15 years, the Japanese trio has released more than 20 albums of heavy eclecticism- stoner bludgeons and thrash blasts, dense drones and noise screes.
Boris have never been one for hedged bets or bridled ambitions.
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