BORIS
PINK
(2006; SOUTHERN LORD)
RATING:
TRACK LISTING: 1) Farewell / 2) Pink / 3) Woman On The Screen / 4) Nothing Special / 5) Blackout / 6) Electric / 7) Pseudo-Bread / 8) Afterburner / 9) Six, Three Times / 10) My Machine / 11) Just Abandoned My-Self
Taking their name from “Boris,” a tune off the Melvins'
Bullhead (1991) album, you know this Japanese band’s shit’s gonna be fat and wobbly. But you can’t understand just how giant it is til you chuck on
Pink (2006) and get sand-blasted and lulled with its massive marijuana grooves. And this is supposed to be their most accessible record to date! I don’t know about the others, but these guys can write a song and drain a bong like it was your daddy’s pool or ballsack.
Pink has accessibility out the yin-yang, like a garage with extra wide doors and ramps and shit for the disabled. Face it, they’re a metal band, but Boris ain’t afraid to lucky dip the hard 'n' heavy sections of the record bin. “Farewell” opens up and gives you a soaring, seven-and-a-half-minute slab of shifting shoegazer metal with sensitive reverbed vocals a bit like the Deftones, but gianter. It’s the second longest track next to the dirty, galloping epic “Just Abandoned My-Self”—a track preceded by the sumptuous and clean “My Machine” and ending on some truly fuzzed and fucked amp abuse. But these wide-open tunes of delight and decay bookend what for the most part can be described as compressed-garage-grunge-doom. “Afterburner” is a druggy jammer that could grow afros on Wolfmother’s collective chest and “Blackout” brings the doom to the forefront with downtuned destruction and ethereal feedback whistling through the skulking, hulking morass. The title track is a surging Motorhead pummeler that is equal parts amphetamine thrash and rock ‘n’ roll trash. “Woman On the Screen,” “Nothing Special,” and “Pseudo-Bread” also revel in this kind of scummy, early-‘70s proto-punk-vs-metal stomp; piling Wata’s layers of fuzzy shredding onto the primal thump of Atsuo and Takeshi, the drummer and bassist both hollering like surly, horny teenagers while they make the foundations swagger.
I’ve never been to Japan, but I bet with their massive population, if they have garages, they’re fuckin tiny, if not entirely metaphorical. Boris have managed to cram a giant irradiated lizard’s worth of hard rockin', psychedelic metal in there, that’s closer to the obstreperous prehistoric roar of Bled Zepple, Dack Purpath, and Leep Sabblin with a heapin’ helpin’ of the industrial-strength Detroit stank of MC Stooge 5, than any of metal’s more recent mathematical discoveries. You can board up the windows, but Boris’s atomic breath still leaks out the sides and lets the rising sun shine in to be faced with a grin.
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IMAGES
Pink*
(album cover used under fair dealing)
*images on this page were taken from the following Wikipedia page:
Pink
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