Lovingly pinched from Hellbound.ca: Boris is always at its best and most exciting the more adventurous they get, and the two new records, Heavy Rocks and Attention Please, are just that, as both see drummer Atsuo, guitarist Wata, and bassist Takeshi embrace their accessible side in ways nobody, especially those on the metal side of the fence, could possibly have imagined.
Both turn out to be essential inclusions in the Boris discography, mandatory listens, but listeners who jones for Wata’s brilliant, heavy riffing might want to start with Heavy Rocks, if anything for familiarity’s sake. Not to be confused with the 2002 album of the same name, Heavy Rocks doesn’t so much redefine Boris’s music as refine it.
The diminutive Wata is a tower of strength when flaunting her Les Paul, and the stomping ‘Riot Sugar’ features what might be her greatest riff to date, a bluesy, doom-fueled chord progression that makes Down seem trite and dares to equal the menace of classic Eyehategod. ‘Leak -Truth,yesnoyesnoyes-’ plays up the psychedelic rock to such a degree (is that Ghost‘s Michio Kurihara on lead guitar?) that it starts to resemble the raw jam band stylings of Swedish retro geniuses Dungen.
The d-beat driven ‘GALAXIANS’ and the raucous ‘Jackson Head’ play up the Stooges / MC5 / Hawkwind vibe the band has always done so well, while ‘Window Shopping’ dives back into the Melvins worship of Boris’s early material. The dynamic, drone-drenched ballads ‘Missing Pieces’ and ‘Aileron’ are as effective as always, but at more than 12 minutes in length each, they’re more of a buzzkill than anything, detracting from the pure, garage rock fun of the rest of the album. In all, it’s a near-perfect distillation of their power trio incarnation, a terrific rock ‘n’ roll record.
Put on Attention Please, however, and the real fun begins. Fully embracing pop as opposed to rock, it’s the most daring piece of work the band has ever come out with, not to mention potentially the most polarizing. One’s first instinct is that this album risks sounding as disastrous a turn as Celtic Frost’s notorious Cold Lake, but Boris adapts so gracefully to this change in musical direction that it feels completely natural.
Although Wata’s riffs aren’t totally nonexistent, the way her guitars are layered and buried so subtly in the mix serves as a vital “poptimist” lesson for the “rockist” mindset, that when the hook is accentuated more than the riff, when a band’s whole far exceeds the sum of its parts, it can be just as effective as simply bashing out a three-chord song, let alone playing a tritone riff for 20 minutes.
Continue reading: Boris – Heavy Rocks / Attention Please | Hellbound.ca.
Tags: Album of the day, Atsuo, Attention Please, boris, Heavy Rocks, Hellbound, Sargent House, Takeshi, Wata
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 4:10 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
No Responses to “Album of the day: Boris – Heavy Rocks / Attention Please”