After being silent for nearly three years, Japan's
Boris returned with a vengeance in 2011, issuing three albums, all of which reappraise, to varying degrees, their original rep as a noise-metal power trio.
Attention Please and
Heavy Rocks (the latter an extension of an album with that title from 2002) were released on the same day in May. Those albums were assembled from material cut for an abandoned offering. In turn, over half of New Album contains revisioned material from those records. (A slightly different version of the record was issued earlier in the year in Japan, which is normal behavior for this band.) New Album goes one step further: it combines the spacier sonics of
Attention Please with the overdriven power riffage on
Heavy Rocks. To accomplish this unholy marriage, the band hired dance-pop arranger and producer Shinobu Narita, who makes the most of his opportunity, glossing up the proceedings with relish and abandon -- so much so, in fact, that less seasoned
Boris fans may initially be hard-pressed to identify the band. Deeply inspired by J-pop's synthetic production techniques and sheeny surfaces, this mix places vocals, loops, and keyboards way up front as guitars and drums are moved more into the backdrop as part of the album's overall bright, dreamy atmosphere. Overall, New Album is a meld of dissonant rock harmonics, dance-pop, and indie pop, and it works. Opening the set is "Flare," a true standout. It's the beautifully warped meeting of J-pop anime soundtrack aesthetics and propulsive rockist urgency: guitars literally crash against keyboard loops and spacious ambiences amid an infectious melody. The intense 4/4 bass drum on "Party Boy" (from
Attention Please), originally colored by low-tuned bass and guitars with electronic blips, has been fleshed out with angular sketchy keyboard lines and blurry backwards guitar riffs. "Spoon" (also from
Attention Please) takes shoegaze pop, fluffs it up with woozy, cloud-climbing keyboards with brittle eccentric sonics tacked inside, and sends
Wata's vocal drifting over the top. The U.S. version of New Album replaces "Black Original" with the frenzied, brilliant, over-the-rails production excess that is "Luna." “Pardon?” is spacious and jangly, with sparse jazz-like phrases from
Wata. "Les Paul 86" suffers a bit due to its elimination of the crazy metallic guitar assault that appeared on the original. "Jackson Head" (from
Heavy Rocks II) is an insistent, cracking rocker with luxuriant textures --
Wata's razored guitar solo attack and the frenzied drum and basslines of
Atsuo and Takeshi, respectively, are uncut aural heroin. The long and dreamy "Looprider," a new song and set closer, is redolent of
Sonic Youth at their most poptastic. Terminal hipsters and
Boris' more metal-oriented devotees might decry New Album as a failed experiment, but they'd be wrong to do so. After 15 years,
Boris are doing exactly what they should with fascinating results: testing their limits as a band and expanding their sonic horizons. ~ Thom Jurek