Boris - Pink (2005)
Been diggin' Boris, so I've been throwing on whatever albums by them that RYM said weren't drone, and now I'm on this album. What a weird ****ing album. RYM lists the genres of the album as "noise rock, stoner metal, stoner rock, sludge metal, psychedelic rock, doom metal". Does that help you out any? Well it shouldn't, cause I'm almost done listening to this thing and I still don't know what the **** to call it.
First track "Farewell" is the lovechild of My Bloody Valentine and Eyehategod. Lethargic, heavy riffs meet lush, dreamy walls of distortion to make sweet, sweet love to your ears. So, got your sludge metal, noise rock, and I guess psychedelic rock covered right there. It's a ****ing awesome song too, so I'm all stoked for more of the same.
Then comes the title track. It's pretty much stoner/noise rock played at punk rock speed. Okay. Some variety. Nice. Also a ****ing awesome song. Just totally infectious, and the dude's singing voice has this great energy. The next two songs are pretty much the same, and all just as awesome. I'm kind of confused now, because at no point has the sound of the first song been referenced at all. I ain't mad though, cause even if it doesn't all make sense, the band hasn't dropped the ball yet. This album is kicking some ass!
And now we come to "(Blackout)". Things slow down again, so I'm figuring they're going to start incorporating the two sounds they've used thus far and create even higher levels of awesome. NOPE! Instead of either shoegazey sludge of noisy stoner we get mostly instrumental doom awash in a thick layer of feedback and distortion that is harrowing and creepy rather than dreamy. What the **** is going on? Did the band just not have any idea what kind of music they wanted to write from day to day and just decide to record the album anyway? Am I being ****ed with?
I don't know whether or not I should have been expecting it when the band goes back to the high energy stoner of earlier. Still, there's a further twist, as the next song is a one minute and forty-five second long instrumental. Well played Boris. Well played. But soon enough it's back to stoner business, and **** me do Boris play some of the best stoner rock I've ever heard in my life. They may not have the thunderous heaviness of Kyuss due to the high speed they're playing, but that much distortion coming at you at such high speeds makes it feel like you're on the back of a Kawasaki motorcycle while the driver is in an illegal street race.
They slow things down yet again for "Afterburner" (ironically enough), but rather than dreamy sludge or evil doom, they now play some slacker stoner that sounds like Black Sabbath are too baked off their asses to really do much more than sit around in a circle and lazily jam while passing around joints. If Boris' parents needed any further proof that their kids like doing drugs then here is Exhibit ... **** if I know what exhibit they're up to now.
After one more blast of double-speed stoner the band move on to an eleven-minute song, "My Machine", that makes it sound like the band were like, "You know who's awesome? Brian Eno." There's what sounds like piano with some slow, dreamy guitar that eventually devolves into ambient feedback, backed with intermittent sound effects that sound more like waves on a beach than anything else. By the end, everything but those weird wave-sounding effects fade out. I feel like I should be ready for whatever head-****ery Boris wants to throw at me by this point, but I am yet again thrown for a loop.
Closing out the album is "Just Abandoned Myself", an eighteen-minute song that I guess is their version of "Sister Ray". It barrels along at full speed with that punkified stoner/noise sound for several minutes, before devolving into feedback backed by a fully functioning rhythm section, until the drums fade away as well, leaving a repetitive bass line playing under ever increasing swathes of noise, and then even the bass is gone. The song is now only a little over halfway done at this point. Somewhere in the background there's a guitar that occasionally pops up to do nothing in particular but be weird, aaaannnnndddd that's the rest of the song, end album, where's Boris' ****ing Grammy?