This past March Japan’s Boris released their first record in 2011 as a part of a series of three forthcoming releases: New Album, Attention Please, and (a hopeful return to something) Heavy Rocks. The new Heavy Rocks is purple, as opposed to the original which is orange in color! However, that album isn’t going to be released until May 24th, and unlike New Album, it is going to be an international release. New Album’s not purple in color, but that is OK. It still has a nice looking anime mouth having, humanoid lady on the cover. It was a Japan only release and was let loose back in March. New Album’s sound is about as muddy, destructive and all over full of the guts – the guts from Boris that we’re all used to – as it would be if you cleaned your bathroom using a garden hose. We’re just confused that New Album is not like washing a dog using a boat sander or much in the way that we’ve really, spiritually come to expect. New Album is shiny.
Given Boris’ new-er releases like the Heavy Rock Hits volumes or the split with 9dw, it is not in a totally unanticipated move that New Album comes off leaving older fans with misgivings about them, their new musical direction, and the legitimacy concerning things as important as the lunar space landing. More importantly New Album may soon supply a new audience with the same feelings about them but in an opposite, historical order. For example, if you have been listening to Boris since the years they initially yanked the pull string of their deep seated gain adulation to the point now – where the dance floor goes air force – then we suppose that if you started now, listening to New Album – the point of hearing afterburners inside a club – upon climbing your way down into their discography, and uncovering the dino bones of an excellent psychedelic nature, then you’re left like the rest of us: you have a real pickle on your hands when it comes to understanding any aspect of Boris in combination with New Album and not feeling like an idiot for it.
That’s not to say there aren’t other really interesting aspects of the record. There are. Like the ridiculous amount of attention given to (cheap) imminent jabs of soulless music-boxing that reek of Visual Kei the likes of Hideto “hide (ヒデ “hee-dey”)” Matsumoto. It even has euro-dance modulation over top most of its riffs which really bring to mind opening themes of the anime, Death Note or literally any other “edgy” anime you could see on Cartoon Network. Edgy in this case means an anime not about a group or girls in highschool and instead means that at least three of the characters – if not male – are witches or alter-dimensional beings. All that trash aside, Hide was pretty great, as was X Japan, but in the States one may find similarity between those artists and Skid Row or Iron Maiden when encountering the Motely Crue inspired glam riffs of 90’s J-metal. You would not be the first jerk to think that but if you go along with a that brand of cynicism you may want to stop reading now. What is mind numbing and finger blistering about most J-music is its ability to be stimulated by international influences, let’s say glam rock, internalize it’s major traits and then reinterpret those things back out through what, if pressed hard enough, someone Japanese would say was “the Japanese way”. More simply through a Japanese lens. Do not ask us what that is. We are not Japanese. This sort of thing becomes very apparent when listening to J-pop or any Japanese music really. Please do not be confused in thinking that what we are talking about is related solely to musical scales or the blazing truth that the music will be sung in Japanese. That’s a part of it all, however the other decisions you’ll be presented with – beyond the physicality of the music – might just help you triangulate the position of your own cultural identity in the Milky Way and do it with the precision of an archaeologists.
Where the the less edgy, and less Heavy Metal sounding groups of old millennium Japan were Blanky Jet City and Mr. Children, Boris has tossed its glittery scarf into the ring somewhere in between them all. Why? We haven’t a clue. This leaves us with a lot of questions. One of them being if non-japanese or non-anime minded people, or Boris fans in general are even capable of liking something this steeped in J-rock tradition?
We’ll just see, but in the meantime getdelicious is still amusing ourselves with the idea that New Album is either some sort of hatred inspired Rock and Roll billboard addressing the rampant accessibility of music via the internet, or maybe it’s just some sort of hoax. All of that though is superfluous in a way. It’s more probable that this new Boris is just a step in a weird, popular music direction. One that requires some formal definition of what “Otaku” is. Most people are talking about it like that anyway. But for now let’s take the hoax idea away and it needs to be said that when reaching for a chapter in the good book of Boris we’ll be reaching for one without the title New Album, always. At a final look, what we’ve ended up with is a big hole where our large intestines used to be – out of sadness as well as by g-forces.
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When we remind ourselves of why we like either boris, BORIS, or Boris and when we remind ourselves of liking all of them as much as we do, something always sticks with us. It is something gong basher Astuo of Boris said in describing what happens when the group approaches music… it even sort of sounds like maybe it was also the reason why they approached music in the first place.
First, what’s all kinds of interesting about it is the thought that before anyone had ever wondered what the hell a Boris was, all three members; Wata, Atsuo and Takeshi, lived as human beings. They rode trains while having to stand up. They bought their own instant ramen. I bet they even had to call their phone company if they had a a problem with their Keitai (cell phone) bill. Weird. Standing in a crowd of apathetic music people and watching those same people, over the cours of sixty minutes, become happily stupefied upon seeing a Boris live show, the thought that these “hikikomori” rock scientists have done anything else outside of music never crosses your mind. Beyond that realizing that you are one of these people that have been rocketed out into “innerspace”, that is also a real precious feeling. Quickly, “hikikomori” is a phenomenon in Japan that happens when, given the fear or anxiety a J-person feels while living as a Japanese person in a Japanese society, they begin to remain indoors and isolate themselves, interminably. But Boris — human beings? Big deal! “They hain’t so tough!” or something. “I can handle that,” is how you may feel. The thought will hit you one day, eventually, that writing out the tomes of How Rock and Roll Loved Me and Left Me was not always the way Takeshi got laid, or how Atsuo stays so thin, nor has every man with a pair of eyes and a penis immediatley been attracted to Wata. Before the cover of Takeshi’s Heavy Rock Hits Vol. I, which is a picture of him in all black, open collared shirt and surrounded by some purplish background, you’d never have known the guy owned a pair of eyeballs as Boris is so mired in guitar-mythos. But these days they look more than human so nothing’s totally surprising anymore. Before the completion of the the last millennium, what is interesting is that all the members of Boris were previously human beings who not only were human but people that had childhoods, worked at jobs and maybe, probably, even went to school. We are sitting here telling you that the three daemons that compose one of the world’s most explosive rock bands who may or may not be responsible for why most things Kraut are really en vogue these days, a band whose fan base is willing to drop around two hundred American dollars on a double vinyl-dvd-artbook release, and who are card carrying psychedelic priests of the highest order, that not at all the points of their existence were they smashing cosmic boulders with Rock and Roll magic. We suppose though that when it comes to most artists as penetrating as Boris that people can grow to feel that way – they’ve only ever been doing music it would seem. That is not the confounding part of what Atsuo’s statement can be inferred as. The real question is “What in the green hell were they thinking of approaching before the music?”
What. The. Fuck.
Of all the possible things that could have been buried, aged, and then brought back from the grave the way in which Boris does, why couldn’t they have made a hybrid automobile technology that runs on genetically re-birthed and then immediately incinerated dinosaur — or maybe anti-volcano technology that really just ended up being a way to perforate the earth’s crust with a series of “less serious volcanoes” to be detonated as a means to relieve geological stress. Who knows? It’s a fair trade though because now the world has Rainbow and things like the original Heavy Rocks amongst other records of theirs.
Second, what was actually said in regards to Boris’ approach to music is that they start from mistakes – their mistakes. This is done in order to get an a-musical quality. A “non-professional quality” or the what we like to call the “mis-set bone of Rock and Roll” approach. In classical music tradition embracing something like this is humiliating. Glenn Gould stopped performing live altogether citing the “blood-sport” involved with live performance. Indulging in something like this is really the Rock and Roll legacy, but for the classically minded it is as embarrassing as walking into a bathroom where upon walking out someone notices that the top three button of your shirt have come undone for “some reason”. It’s also as simple as despising a mis-struck chord on a piano or audibly passing wind during a performance. The question is what happens to 1. the player when this happens, 2. the music in which they were playing and 3. how all of that is tied into what the audience is hearing – not hearing, but more importantly if both the audience and performer should A. panic!, B. feel it! or C. project thoughts about it’s implications in terms of it being i. an accident, ii. intentional, or iii. an act of divinity/fate/destiny/human creation/what the fuck ever!.
These Boris dudes are pretty far out (smart) you say? Yes. It may be true that maybe they are not just tone-jockies out to blow the ears off your head, albeit that happens too.
The approach to music as heard on New Album is most probably a new approach all together, but maybe not. From the mis-set bone of Rock and Roll perspective maybe Boris views J-rock, Visual Kei, or the like as nostalgic lethargy and more specifically one gigantic mistake. It has taken them nearly two decades to get to this point it seems, but let’s say that New Album becomes a little more tasteful by this analysis. We’ve established some sort of accessibility to it that goes beyond liking how easy it is to listen to (and forget). Now, Boris, if they still treat their approach as they’ve claimed, and given that that approach can never really totally encapsulate all possible Boris methodologies, the latest release would imply that during demo sessions perhaps all of their gut-punching riffs began to progress towards having a real “musical quality”. By the way if you are looking for riffs that could bite through the fabric of time and space, we’d recommend looking for them somewhere else in the 15+ years Boris has been cranking it out. The licks and riffs on New Album are not lacking anything really, they just get to an uptempo cruising altitude and then stay there, waiting for something else to pique your interest. While sweating this album out perhaps their “mistakes” molted. Dinosaurs are hypothesized to have grown feathers and taken to flight so stranger things like a philosophy turning in on itself have happened. The idea is that the focus towards the a-musical quality gravitated back towards something else. Previous to this Boris would blow said correct lines off and stick with other parts for that “non-professional quality” they seemed to go for. The urge to slap Rock around is great and Boris kept grinding on the bastard, remained faithful to the Boris philosophy and then it happened. The implosion. The big bust. The shirt button of their own musical lineage shot off and opened itself up like the rotting carcass of an animal, dead in the woods. But, they fixed the shirt buttons back up upon stepping out of the bathroom this time. Bluntly, they deconstruct their own deconstruction and without even intending to. How fucking chic! They celebrate despite that old “mistake” that they were starting from being the best decision, musically, that they had ever stumbled upon. Though things like Heavy Rocks or Akuma No Uta always sounded like the “right thing” to do despite them sounding like a typewriter in a garbage disposal or of the same quality that a cake would be if made by a beaver. Yet another example of what we’re trying to say is similar to what happened when people were researching a experimental blood pressure medicine to help the human heart. Instead discovering a medicine with the intended effects of controlling blood pressure, instead it gave patients a raging, possessed boner. A boner that could help you “dig out”, for lack of a better term, any lady of your having. Not only did the medicine not do what it was intended but it currently helps people in some sort of cosmetic way by helping them to simply penetrate. Up until this point Boris was sitting there with a boner that could not fail!
Having an erection this powerful would get tedious after a while.
Over time the Endearing Misery of musical quality emerged to this point as the Splendid Problem. If you put something off for long enough it tends to leak back into whatever it is that you were trying to keep it from in the first place. In the film Jurassic Park they simply chalk up our general misunderstanding of genetic, evolutionary holes in the phrase “Life finds a way.” You could think of this type of thing as something extra. Having a server bring an accidentally free bloomin’onion to your table or like getting a discount at the register where you were willing to pay full price for that pair of pants in the clearance section. In this case, proper musicality found a way. What do we mean by “proper musicality”? Without going into obtuse and idiotic detail “proper musicality” is most definitely not concept albums with tracks lasting 18 minutes where really only a handful of notes are played. Its a good idea, but music theory it’s not. Theory stuff tends to really get revved up when you cause horrible problems for the human ear in the form of 12 independent things happening at once, in different scale, and those things being counterpuntal. Boris has never done that. They have always been part of music’s “undoing” and the sledgehammer for that kind of intricacy. Its minimalism in a way and finds itself antithetically inspired to speedy intricacy. In fact, the whole drone and sludge movement has really taken to task all that musical theory rot and has made the both of them better for it, giving stiff opposition to all the general principles of classical ideas.
This is just a possibility in dissecting what it is New Album is of course. If this were an action suspense drama it would be the part when the hero goes silent, looks around at the church he is standing in and whispers, “…the accident was never really an accident at all.” The Boris Philosophy is now to the point where the only way to get that “accident” would be to make the “right” musical choice. In the realm BORIS, it’s all gone topsy-turvy. The musical quality has become what Boris is aiming for.
New Album, when placed in a private music collection or the genre section of someones iTunes written in, it will say Visual Kei or Kaiju or Heavy Metal and most definitely not Rock and Roll; that is unless the person is some sort of slob. But realistically, can an entire genre be considered a “mistake”? We’re jerks but we’re not assholes. It’s different strokes for different folks and although New Album is part of a totally un-Boris sounding genre, it certainly doesn’t feel like some sort of mistake. The only problem: that BORIS sound gets buried underneath all the glamorous thrust of doing something new like J-rock. Making the mistake of thinking New Album was actually a ナイトメア (Nightmare) or ヂイルーアンーグレイ(Dir En Grey) release isn’t totally accurate. However immediately hearing Boris! when “Party Boy” comes on isn’t accurate neither.
From an austere production and composition angle New Album is clean, painless, defined, loud, fast and devoid of any real discernible emotions beyond “yeah motherfucker, let’s go!!!” The album plays out like a cautionary tale saying that if you have this much fun, by track five the E is going to wear off – you’ll get an introspective comedown, but there is good news – you can do something when the E wears off! “What is it,” you can do when the E wears off, you ask? Find the dude that has E and take more E. The rest of New Album is that dude and it’s going to get you flying high again. Maybe a format like this is some commentary akin to a concept of a monastic platitude. Without giving away any spoilers about which religion or philosophy this appeals to, we think it has to do with desire and what the implications are when you submit to it. Again for old fans, the pain is immediate and it is confusing. Instead of staving off these musically correct compositions, it’s time to indulge’in’em. Have fun or something — (UGH!) life’s too short (PUKE!).
Man, if you have ever really loved anything in your life and it hasn’t loved you back life is mostly too fucking long! It’s better to have loved than to never have loved at all is what they say. Let us report now that pain does pass.
All of this is speculation. It could be junk. Well, all of this is junk. No matter how clever all of it is or how fucking idiotic, it is really just one possibility. A plain indulgent one too. We’d have to be dangled, naked, from a sewage pipe, surrounded by military guards, in bright light to believe someone would spend this much of their time and money making something like this. “Telling” us that, “The great Rock and Roll enlightenment is over! We have peace! The soul exists, so your suffering is for good cause! Now…let’s realize our feelings together…in the club!” seems as cheese filled as pizza roll. In this case we are siding with reason and the fact that maybe we’re reading into this way too much.
Three Albums in One Year and The Hoax Master General
If you have more than a decade of work under your belt where you steadily make one proper, full length release a year and leave room for touring and intermittent collaborations with other artists, then after two years of making no full length recordings at all is answered by releasing three full length releases the following year, it’s obvious that no one has actually had two years off. They may have been planning. They were touring amongst other things. “They” is Boris and they have been busy, maybe. Not to scourge this steed any more, but when you have to look for mistakes you must be doing a whole helluva lot correctly – at least most of the time. Ok, you’d have to at least have very concrete ideas about what is and what isn’t correct. Without going into the idea of “correct” for whom and why, it entails that Boris consider themselves real artists. Spending time, spending money, making plans, executing them and finalizing records with more than just a general idea at the ship’s helm. Kurt Cobain would have you know that a sloppy self image, an “I don’t give a shit, mate” attitude and being generally reclusive will convince most people otherwise. But in the past two years we’ve seen not only a different looking Boris but a better dressed one too. The Boris Image has been changing right along with our supposed deconstruction of which was inspired from their original approach, and because of the nature of being on the receiving end of Boris’ music, no matter what the transitions are, as consumer, they become both immediately apparent and not entirely accessible.
The question is, Is New Album real? Is it sincerely a popcorn tub of music worth eating? Are these guys seriously expecting anyone to be able to bend their minds around Boris going from ground zero tumble weeds of tone into the diamond hard obfuscation of one encompassing J-rock genre? Probably not. But for arguments sake what the hell is going on? The anticipation for Heavy Rocks and Attention Please is killing us! Will they be Americanized versions of New Album by exploring Nu-Metal bands via Korn or Limp Bizkit??? God, we hope not. For now we are very glad for the confusion, however painful it is because let’s face it – there isn’t much in the way of anything else to go head over balls for the like Boris.
We cannot explain the paradoxical nature of both the confusion over this image change and the sincerity of this sound canyon of difference other than with this forthcoming example: the 1969 moon landing. If you are unaware that there are any questions concerning the validity of the event then the question some people have about the lunar landing is if it was a real or if it had be forged? Was it on a lunar surface or was it a sound stage in Burbank, CA. that humans were stepping on in ‘69?
The “truth” scenario:
Two men, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, went into space, propelled by a rocket with the intention of landing on the moon where they would then step out onto the surface of the moon. They were to swing golf clubs to demonstrate the properties of gravity when on the moon. They were to ride around in a scientific go-karts because that’s one helluva thing to do while in space – to cruise, dude! And they were to complete radio and video correspondence with NASA . Once they finished all of that it was get back in the ship and head home.
The “staged” scenario:
Two astronauts were hired by the US government, or some such faction, to play act a radio transmission between them and Houston that they had landed on the moon while (maybe) two homeless men from the San Fernando Valley were hired to show up to a sound stage, act out the already prepared audio correspondence and film it in order to convince the World that America had been the first country to set foot on the moon. All corresponding experiments and demonstrations dealing with gravity, as well as the materials brought back were just movie magic.
Whoa.
Believers of the staged scenario contend that the shadows between the lunar surface and the astronauts in relation to the sun(?) are all wrong. The flag appears to be “blowing”. There isn’t wind in space! Also, if you take a picture of yourself with the help of a tripod the camera and the tripod should be reflected in the face mask of the astronaut whose picture it is of – which it is not apparently.
The only debate that you could ever have about something like this is between the evidence for the landing being real or that the evidence for the landing is manufactured. Can’t really talk about anything else, like there being no evidence at all for being on the moon without someone dressed in white handing you a paper cup with pills in it. When debating about something like the validity of the lunar landing you may feel your hair growing or your forehead getting elongated so be careful. Don’t think about this too much.
One really important thing though that is related to asking if New Album is real and if the lunar landing actually happened is the questions themselves share a commonality. What people don’t usually dispute about is the scope the supposed hoax. Understanding that if America can get to the moon then it’s safe to imply that they could probably lay any country to waste is something similar to what people said about President, Barack Obama’s declaration that Osama Bin Laden had been murdered. He was just doing it to get re-elected. Does Boris want to be perceived as some indestructible mountain of Rock and Roll? When in God’s name are politicians not trying to get re-elected? When are musicians not trying to destroy, impress, entice and imperialize your brains. Boris isn’t a group that “sees what happens” like most art-bands do seem to imply these days. It’s a mega bogus to think maybe the impetus for forging a moon landing was to impress humans to the point that if America can get to the moon before the rest of the world, that means everyone will believe them to be simply smarter or something. If there is proof in any of this pudding than this pudding not only looks of shit, but tastes of shit too.
The possibility that the moon landing was a hoax would mean that the fifty year old perception of US held dominance, of which has helped usher us into the world-state we inhabit now means that there is a terrifyingly gigantic number of things riding on, essentially, a joke! How you manipulate people in the perception of world dominance by going where no man has gone before is understandable to a point, kind of. The scope of it, not so much. For the sake of this Boris Crisis we are faced with this, we have to eventually make a decision: are Boris just having fun or do the intentions of New Album really lie somewhere between the needs for Boris to imperialize more genres of music and to simply test the boundaries of their own rock-mythos? If it did turn out that what we thought about New Album is actually true, nothing happens other than us being able to save a few pennies in the future. If it turns out that the moon is still as clean of footprints as a nun’s sheets than…(shivers)
In the truth scenario, if we are being as objective as possible, what we have is thousands upon thousands of man hours in calculation, preparation, training, manufacturing and contingency forecasting – all paid in full – led up to the implementation of the scientifically goaded exploration of new space. It ended with the completion of a launch, a lunar contact, a recording, reconnaissance and the return of two men inside a space module.
Both of these stories are completely and literally fantastic!
The length to which this moon-hoax would have to go to cover its ass up has got to almost outdo the very cost of the hush money required where in comparison, to do all the work entailed in pretending to be preparing to land on the moon, you’d be some sort of unfathomable, idiotic psychopath to spend all that money and time on researching, training, planning, wasting peoples fucking time and not do it. If you’re going to go to those lengths ou may as well land on the Goddamned moon!
The musical supremacy of Boris is imperialistic. The first spin of New Album makes that imperialism seem like a weak ejaculation with X-ray specs on. ”That can’t be,” we thought. Boris though has always been aiming for something terribly interesting with their music. They’ve reinterpreted Rock music forever it seems. Whenever you think of Japan it goes without saying that you’d picture a samurai, or someone in a kimono. Maybe it’s just Mt. Fuji. It could be a sumo wrestler thousand hand slapping Godzilla. Whatever it is that you do think of when you eat sushi or meet a friend’s Japanese foreign exchange student, Boris should be the first words off your tongue if the conversation turns to music. They’re Japanese and they are not. The imperialism may be simply inspired less by our cockamamy theory and more by just the need to feel like they belong somewhere. Boris are hideously confusing and with New Album have asked you to go buy groceries with monopoly money where you become a legend for succeeding. The problem is you cannot buy groceries with Monopoly money, not to mention that Boris has never needed to eat in their entire lives so get ready to change your mind and get ready to believe the unbelievable. New Album has landed.
