W - Boris: Review
Boris
is the long running and prolific Japanese experimental rock band who have released dozens of studio albums and collaborations in their 25+ years as a band. W comes as a spiritual successor to their previous album NO which was the result of writing sessions during pandemic isolation.
Review By Lav:
I'm finally gonna review Boris. While I heard and publicly discussed their past 3 or 4 studio albums and their collaborative album with Mezrbow, I just never found the time to sit down and properly review their material. Now early in the year with my to do list less clogged than usual it's finally time to talk about W. If you're new to this band it can be quite difficult to catch up, trust me I did so in 2015 and still sometimes feel like I'm missing key pieces. But their recent string of records take a slightly less industrial and drone themed sound than some of their past acclaimed works and instead interpolate much more post-rock and pseudo ambient passages. Despite that from album to album and even between songs the band is likely to switch up their styles repeatedly and this record was no different.
In the lead up to the album I mentioned that I wasn't particularly excited by the two singles the band released, so let's start there. Drowning By Numbers was the first single from last year and I find that it isn't very predictive of the records sound at all. It pairs their typically eerie vocals with a stuttering drum beat and some warbly guitars hanging in the mix. Since I first heard the song as a single I've thought that the counting refrains were a bit of a strange decision and they take a lot of the tangible drama out of the composition. The other single Beyond Good And Evil isn't a favorite either but I do like it a little bit more. I'm surprised it was a single given how sonically sparse it is and even though it builds up to something pretty dense by the end of it all, it doesn't compare to many of the louder and busier moments on the record.
Thankfully those are the only two tracks I have any major complaints about. I Want To Go To The Side Where You Can Touch is a very distant introduction to the album but I don't really mind that about it. The track runs its course through some more frontal percussion and more distinct and less droney guitars. It's a climactic build where the extremely hushed vocals just feel like another piece of guiding instrumentation. Icelina comes next and by comparison it's a much more instrumentally spare moment with some dreamy guitar licks and percussion that's saved for just the right moments. While the song doesn't really have a punchy or dramatic conclusion I still enjoy the subtleties of the soundplay and progression here.
Invitation is probably the closest the record gets to slowcore, which if you know me you know that means I really enjoyed it. It also translates really well between the two tracks bookending it which is pretty much everything I could ask from one of the shorter songs on the record. On the other side of things we have the records longest track You Will Know which is equally slow in its opening moments. The majority of the song is a slow burning build up with everything absolutely soaked in reverb and pedal effects. The punchy drum hits are probably the best individual part of the song but I do like the backing vocal harmonies quite a bit as well. As the song goes on it gets much less composed with echoing guitar passages blending in and out of the background. I like the track even if every single moment isn't as rich with texture as I would have hoped.
The Fallen is more towards the heavy industrial rock that a lot of fans I saw online were expecting. It has chugging riffs and those electric guitar leads that make for a very familiar combo. In the back half of the song it gets a lot glitchier with sputtering sounds jumping in and out of the mix which I found myself enjoying repeatedly. Finally Old Projector is predominately just a guitar piece and I would say it's something more akin to drone or ambient than the swelling post-rock of much of the album. That is however, until the last minute of the song where it becomes a pummeling industrial rock jam completely out of nowhere, but I'm not complaining.
I can't say there's anything on this record that made me go wow or anything that grabbed me in a way no other experimental rock ever has. But with that being said I think the technical execution from a songwriting and production standpoint does come together for a crafty and compelling set of songs. The spacious mixes make for great moments of chilling isolation that occasionally come back to back with epic crashes of noise. When all is said and done I think this is a good piece of genre blending experimental rock, but not a record that really takes it to the next level. 7/10
