Shortly before the halfway point of “Angel”, the eighteen-minute centerpiece of Boris’ latest record, the band’s guitarist Wata chases after God. The instrument of her noble pursuit is an extravagant, elegiac solo: her axe weeps and wails like a professional mourner, eventually tearing the surrounding space asunder to allow everything—the dark and the light, the leaden and the featherweight—to rush in. It’s this sensation that’s earned the Japanese trio a seat at the pantheon of heaviness: this alchemy by which the act of listening to loud rock music is transformed into an encounter with the sublime.
A self-proclaimed “noise” band renowned for Melvins-style sludge and Merzbow collaborations, Boris excel at playing around with magnitudes. But they’re sneakier than they appear: their true calling card isn’t brute force, but carefully calculated punishment. The patient approach that Boris took on 2000’s Floodindicated thatthey’d rather have listeners climb the summit slowly, stopping to admire the pretty scenery up to the moment that they hit the precipice and tumble into a free-fall. With the release of their new LP Noise, all of the panoramas the band has crafted over the past two decades—stoner rock, shoegaze, ambient, pop—have coalesced into one massive, smoldering landscape. Eighteen-minute mammoths stride alongside sprightly two-minute cuts, thrash metal pops up out of nowhere to stick a shiv in post-rock’s back. Imposing, insane, and all-over-the-place: in other words, par for Boris’ course.
Noise boasts one of the most engaging openers on a Boris album to date: the haunting, and disarmingly catchy “Melody”. The persistent downward pull of the guitars creates a grungy line of tension that the band is all too willing to exploit. Ever wonder what it would sound like if Garbage went avant? Wonder no more: through smooth harmonies and even smoother production, Boris replicates the blueprint of slick alternative rock and then some, both on “Melody” and its craggier cousin “Vanilla”. On the other hand, the limp “wo-oah”s and recycled wasted-youth tropes of “Taiyo no Baka” present irrefutable proof that Boris aren’t cut out for pop.
Between the rabid hardcore of the nine-minute “Quicksilver” and the slow, steady suffocation of “Heavy Rain”, fans of Pink and Heavy Rocks will most likely find something to enjoy on Noise. That said, there’s a fine line between drone and fatigue, and at times, Boris get bogged down by the latter on many of the longer songs. Delicate as it may be, even the the final portion of “Angel” can’t help but feel like a slog when it features several minutes of insignificant repetition.
To listeners who are intimidated by the prospect of leaping into the band’s extensive discography, Noise provides a better incentive: as both look back and a step forward, it serves as a possible gateway album, and more intriguingly, it hints at a new chapter in the band’s chameleonic career through which all their scattered points of reference might operate in beautiful, deadly unison.