The final section is a five-note, chromatic riff that straddles both the major and minor scales, and repeats for ten minutes, slowly decaying, losing volume, sinking, perhaps, out of sight. A riff emerges from the cacophony, lumbering and heavy and curiously major key Takeshi and Atsuo holler in harmony over it.
#Awaiting on you all chords crack
The second half of Flood begins with a noise freakout, an aural storm that will soon crack the sky wide and unleash the chaos. The doubleneck guitar – so quintessentially rock & roll it's a no-no these days – is at least functional, but what of the gong? Or the official Boris earplugs at the merch table, which come in the cool metal case? The band's emotionless stage persona betrays no clues, no signs of playfulness or irony. I find myself wondering, for instance, how much of Boris' stage act is tongue-in-cheek. All kinds of interesting things sneak in that space between what is said and what is understood. Is this how Black Sabbath records sound to Boris? I think of the screaming Japanese teenagers at the Budokan, watching Cheap Trick in '78: could they fully grasp the nuances of the lyrics, those dirty little jokes in 'Surrender'? Surely something is lost is this cross-cultural transmission. What does it mean to love a band and never know what they're singing about? The lyrics are a mystery, a suggestion of meaning, a kind of Rorschach image on which to project whatever you wish. After about 10 minutes, the drums drop out, and a new set of chords are introduced – gorgeous, chiming, peaceful – over which Takeshi and Atsuo sing wistful verses in Japanese. Wata manipulates an Ebow and volume pedal with great restraint, creating impressions of notes that sound like a violin played underwater. It begins with a very simple, very slow drumbeat in 4/4, over which Takeshi plays a sequence of two doleful chords for what feels like forever. Much of Boris' best work is built on frustrated expectations, which lays the path for genuine surprise when the song finally turns into the white-hot, blistering metal you've been awaiting all along.įlood is an excellent summary of Boris' strengths. You submit, allowing yourself to be taken somewhere surprising, somewhere you might not care to go. In a live setting, you can't hit skip or fast-forward. The annoyance blossoms into anxiety, until at last you resign yourself to the hypnotic reiteration. Then you grow annoyed, anticipating a change that never seems to arrive. Repetition can have a strange effect on a listener. But on the second night, Boris really stretch out. For the first night, that sense of temporal freedom is mostly reigned in for a set of peppy, three-to-five-minute songs. By about halfway through the first night, the mere hint of a Wata solo begins to trigger some kind of Pavlovian response in me: I roll back on my heels with eyes pressed shut. Buoyed by the powerhouse rhythm section, these are the moments when the band sounds fullest and most fluid. The sultry 'Rainbow' leads into ragers like 'Pink' and 'Dyna-Soar,' culminating in the echo-drenched psychedelia of 'Farewell.' Wata's mind-warping, slow-handed guitar solos are the highlights.
The first night is a crowd-pleasing, primarily uptempo affair. This is a band that named an album Amplifier Worship, after all. With the first note, it's clear why the records are doomed to fail: no home stereo system can capture the rich, bottom-heavy sound of Boris live, a sound so muscular, with so much presence, it's as much felt as heard. Could the band successfully meld all those disparate influences into a unique whole? Or would the shows, like the records, turn into a schizophrenic listening experience that is unsatisfying for half the crowd, all the time?īoris – Atsuo on drums, Wata on guitar, and Takeshi on double-necked guitar/bass – take to the stage outfitted in black, standing pokerfaced before a skyline of Sunn and Orange amplifiers, a gong, dozens of custom effects pedals, smoke and lights and a vintage Roland Echoplex. So I experienced some trepidation in advance of their career-spanning two-night residency at New York City's Le Poisson Rouge: on the first night a set of 'all-time classics' culled from their extensive discography on the second a performance of the 2000 album/song Flood. Boris' quartet of 2011 releases – Attention Please, Heavy Rocks, Klatter and New Album – all had compelling moments, but too often played like pastiche, never quite congealing into a distinct identity. Though this adventurous spirit is admirable, it doesn't always make for great listening. The Japanese trio Boris are paragons of post-modern, citation-heavy rock, having proved willing to try just about anything on their albums.
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