Tag Archives: billy corgan

Review: Boris – Noise

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Black cat. Halloween. Coincidence?

But you shouldn’t have been looking at that. You should have been looking at the two words surrounding it, because it suggests something we haven’t heard much of in quite a while. Beginning with Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Vol. 1, Atsuo Mizuno, Takeshi Ohtani, and Wata have spent a lot of time playing at pop stars. Their really quality works of late have mostly been pop oriented, and in the world of metal they’ve been mostly playing around. Heavy Rocks 2011 felt like a joke–a quick fun studio session to take some of the stress off of recording New Album and Attention Please. Präparat offered us the total mindfuck known as “Elegy”, but “Method of Error” and “Bataille Suere” could hardly be taken seriously. We got the long-overdue Boris performing “flood” and a rerelease of The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked, but that wasn’t new material.

Boris deserved a break from their old traditions. Christ, they have 78 releases to their name, and like 95% of that has been beyond fabulous. But as good as their pop and chillout sounds of late have been, we’ve all been itching for some good old Boris noise. Not Absolutego drone. I mean I want to hear some “Heavy Friends”, some “Akuma No Uta”, some “Farewell”, some “My Neighbor Satan”, something to make my brain turn inside out and hug itself. Well, Boris did deliver. They did it last year, in the easily overlooked The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked Extra. In fact, it was so easily overlooked that I am only just now skimming through its tracks for the first time! I can already tell it is awesome, but that will have to wait. Tonight I spin Noise for the first time.

Boris – Melody, from Noise

If you are a Boris fan, this opening track needs no commentary. I suppose no track on the album does, really. But if you are not a Boris fan, picture yourself in our shoes for a minute: You have ridiculous, irrationally high expectations for this album. You can justify it, because the band has never let you down before. But you don’t have a clue what’s in store for you. The graceful drone in the opening 40 seconds could go on for the entire track, and it would not be out of character. Suddenly we’ve got a pretty, shoegaze guitar, and for a brief six or seven seconds your mind wonders whether they might be trying something akin to Alcest. At 47 seconds, a techno beat comes in, and we are on pace for something totally novel. Is it going to be some weird psychedelic technogaze? I wouldn’t put it past them, and I just might like it. But things are picking up… something is about to give….. and bam, at the 1 minute mark Boris unleashes everything I could have ever hoped for and more.

Takeshi slamming out a crushing stoner metal groove under Wata’s wailing blur of blissful noise, and in five seconds we find that techno beat wasn’t just an intro. What IS this amalgamation of mutually exclusive genre standards into an inexplicably majestic whole? This is Boris, doing what Boris always do: taking everything they’ve done before and making it even better. This is a band that remains totally aware of everything going on in music at large and has had twenty three years playing together to master their class. Wata has one of the most beatiful guitar sounds in the world. She slides around the neck with a grace that puts Billy Corgan to shame and rocks the effect pedals so keenly that “Paranoid Android” sounds amateur. Atsuo drums with a persistent intensity that rivals Jimmy Chamberlin (I’ve always felt a bizarre connection between Boris and The Smashing Pumpkins–two bands that defy all categorization.) Takeshi’s mastery of bass and distortion is as good as any stoner band on the market, and his vocal control has come miles from Smile and earlier works.

Stonergaze techno pop? Yeah, we can do that.

Boris – Vanilla, from Noise

The next track, “Vanilla”, is just as fascinating. For the first 40 seconds (55 in the official video) we get a vocal melody and beat that wouldn’t have been out of place in a mid-90s up-tempo rock track–it bizarrely made me think of the Foo Fighters–layered of course with Wata and Takeshi’s constant motion. Then we hit a deep, brooding pause with haunting synth, doomy bass crunch, and a spooky arpeggio loop that says this song is going nowhere near where we expected. The song quickly move back into rock mode, but now we’re expecting something. The guitars embrace a rhythmic metal crunch, and the hard shift to a bassy stoner/doom beatdown for six notes at 1:20 (1:35) makes your brain jitter. No other band would even THINK to do something like that. We’re back into the opening motion, then another break and… is Takeshi playing a death metal riff? Mmhmm. And it’s not like the trashy games they were playing on Heavy Rocks 2011 and a few Präparat tracks. It’s fully immersed and totally appropriate. Wata goes wild, and I am in bliss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GndQg8SsU1o

Boris – Heavy Rain, from Noise

I could narrate every track on this album and never be at a loss for commentary. “Ghost of Romance” might offer the fewest surprises–a traditional Boris chillout song with a pensive undercurrent brought to life with haunting guitar tones and a breath effect that suit the title. It offers a modest post-rock build-up to louder levels of chill, but never at the expensive of a full break from the main vibe of the song. “Heavy Rain”, my personal favorite on first listen, virtually demands you crank the speakers up to 11. Despite the tempo never changing and Takeshi’s heaviest tones coming out within the first minute, this song accomplishes a mindblowing progression. They manage to accomplish the build-up in reverse, putting forth a bunch of sound at once and increasing the suspense by slowly peeling it back. The moment we reach the point of dead silence, the explosion hits, and the rest is all driven by Wata’s ever-growing layers of noise and Atsuo’s knack for making every single percussion count.

“Taiyo No Baka” is a bizarre, sugary, initially minimalistic pop ditty that should confound anyone unfamiliar with the band. But far from filler, it’s quite delightful and has a lot of really interesting effects going on throughout. If I am going to keep the Pumpkins comparisons rolling, this might equate to Mellon Collie‘s move from “X.Y.U.” to “We Only Come Out at Night”. “Angel” is the traditional post-rock track of the album, with six minutes of minimalistic build-up to a crushing guitar plod spiced with Atsuo’s hyper-intense slow drumming and a crooning Wata solo. This in turn serves as build-up to a spirited, meaty rock-out at 9:30 peppered by a highly mobile bass line and some good old post-rock tremolo. We’ve still got over 7 minutes to go as this part winds down, and the rest of the track plays out with a lot of eclectic, melodic experimentation that has to stand among Boris’s best. I’ll be surprised if “Angel” doesn’t grow into my favorite track on the album once I’ve given it a good dozen listens.

Boris – Quicksilver, from Noise

“Quicksilver”, the second to last track, might be where Noise gets its name. Dirty, wild crust with classic tremolo solos encase a sad and pleasing heavy punk chorus. Takeshi’s sung vocals run totally counter to what you might expect in this style of music, and Atsuo’s accompanying screams are out of this world. This is only the beginning. The song is ten minutes long, and while I’ll humor the possibility that it does drag on without much variation at times–it could go on for an hour and I wouldn’t complain–this is the most punk song Boris has pumped out in years. I would die if I saw them play it live–possibly literally. At 6:20, the main thrust of the song climaxes with a monotone tremolo wail, a crusty three chord repeat from Takeshi, and a total Atsuo explosion that for all its collective simplicity doesn’t sound quite like anything I’ve ever heard in metal before. The last 3 minutes of the song are weird to the point of being a little creepy–totally out of character with the seven minutes preceding them and featuring a bubbling static sound that makes your hair stand on end.

The closing track is “Siesta”, and I have to think it was inspired by Atsuo and Michio Kurihara’s recent collaboration with Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))) and Bill Herzog: Ensemble Pearl. It’s a slow, echoed, jazzy chill-out that wraps Noise up nicely. I would feature it here, but I couldn’t find a version on youtube.

So what do I think of this album? Do you even need to ask? It’s everything I could hope for. Sure, it doesn’t offer a killer stand-alone track like “Elegy” from Präparat or “Farewell” from Pink, but it just feels so complete. There is absolutely zero twiddling around, zero wasted time, just 58 action-packed minutes of every technique and style Boris has incorporated into their sound across their illustrious 23 year history. It is a really mature work–perhaps their most mature album to date–and I think it’s the most start-to-finish shear brilliance they have offered on a full-length cd since at least Akuma No Uta–maybe even since Flood. It doesn’t get much more original and imaginative than this.

/fanboy.

Ten Years #30: The Smashing Pumpkins

Posted on by necromoonyeti

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn4xxA3Mj8I

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
30. The Smashing Pumpkins (1,058 plays)
Top track (36 plays): I of the Mourning, from Machina: The Machines of God (2000)

2000 might have been one of the most optimistic years in American history. Bill Clinton was still president, the massive corporate effort to overcome a Y2K electronic doomsday scenario had succeeded impressively, the medical field was speeding towards a glimmering utopian future of nanobots and stem cell technology, and we had just wrapped up the Kosovo conflict to conclude a rare decade characterized more by sincere humanitarian intervention than by capitalist imperialism. Though we would soon plummet back to the social and political stone age in successive waves of decadence, this naive teenager’s outlook on the future was a dreamy ideal of progress. If there was trouble in the air, I never felt it. Whatever concerns the future might bring were fundamentally tied to it, not to the here and now.

Every Smashing Pumpkins album struck me in a fairly unique way. Each Siamese Dream track seemed like an overwhelming independent entity; I would get hung up on a song like “Rocket” and listen to it over and over again for days before moving on to the next. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness I enjoyed more as a collective, basking in the roller coaster romp from ecstasy to sadness to rage that characterized juxtapositions like “Thru the Eyes of Ruby”, “Stumbleine”, and “x.y.u.” Adore kind of washed over me as a kid, and while I appreciate it more today, I will never quite get over the absence of Jimmy Chamberlin.

On Machina: The Machines of God, I think the vision of an album really overtook the band. Each song felt like a part of the collective to a greater degree than ever before. The highs and lows were all subdued. There was more total sound encompassing everything, while the edges of the heaviest tracks were dulled–while “We Only Come Out At Night” and “Tales of a Scorched Earth” certainly belong together as elements of a greater emotional road trip, “With Every Light” and “Heavy Metal Machines” were substantially closer in their musical approach and production. If Mellon Collie was a pendulum swinging violently between beauty and aggression, Machina rocked gently and subtly around its zen point. I fell in love with it even more than with Mellon Collie or Siamese Dream–a feat I did not think possible.

It might go against the popular grain to speak of Machina as the best Pumpkins album–of “I of the Mourning” and “Age of Innocence” as their best songs or “Stand Inside Your Love” as their best single. But these are definitely my favorites. I felt a perfect connection between the overall vibe of this album and my outlook on the world in 2000. “I of the Mourning” captured it perfectly for me–a positive cultivation of a sense of longing framed not by some mournful acoustic guitar but by that encompassing futuristic dream that characterizes the sound of Machina from start to finish.

Perhaps the stars just all aligned in the right place and time. Machina seems more like a personal testament to the band’s experiences together leading up to their impending break-up than a commentary on the state of the world. “Age of Innocence” functioned in retrospect as a clear final farewell. But it was a positive farewell, looking brightly to the uncertain future, and as such it seemed to coalesce with our passage into a new millennium. The 21st century promised, falsely as it turned out, to be a little less compulsive than the last, and I think Corgan likewise saw himself waving farewell to an endearing yet tumultuous phase in his life. I’ll leave you with that closing song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWiMGy3vQtI

We dismiss the back roads
and ride these streets unafraid
resort to scraping paint
from our bones unashamed

no more the eye upon you
no more the simple man

desolation yes, hesitation no
desolation yes, hesitation no
as you might have guessed, all is never shown
desolation yes, hesitation no

and in my prayers I dream alone
a silent speech to deaf ears:
If you want love, you must be love
but if you bleed love, you will die loved

no more the lie upon you
cast in stone the autumn shade

desolation yes, hesitation no
desolation yes, hesitation no
as you might have sensed, we won’t make it home
desolation yes, hesitation no

before the rites of spring
come to mean all things
a little taste of what may come
a mere glimpse of what has gone

cause for the moment we are free
we seek to bind our release
too young to die, too rich to care
too fucked to swear that I was there

desolation yes, hesitation no
desolation yes, hesitation no
as you might have guessed, we won’t make it home
desolation yes, hesitation no

Review: Torche – Harmonicraft

Posted on by necromoonyeti

In 2008, I thought of Torche as the most poppy stoner metal on the market. By 2012, the attributes have reversed. You won’t hear anything quite as doomy as Meanderthal’s title track, Pirhaña, or Sandstorm. That crushingly deep guitar still accompanies most of the tracks, it just doesn’t ever become the drawing point of the songs. On Harmonicraft, a catchy melody is job number one, and the results are tremendously effective. From the cover art on down, this is and will likely remain one of the most instantly appealing albums of 2012, and it exhibits a sort of songwriting ethos which hasn’t been very prevalent since the 90s.

Harmonicraft’s introductory song, Letting Go, certainly doesn’t mesmerize the way Triumph of Venus did. But unlike Grenades, Kicking requires no epic lead in:


Kicking

Kicking introduces what will be the style and attitude for the entire album, and it amounts to nothing short of 1990s alternative rock. That occasional Foo Fighters vibe Meanderthal gives off was no accident, but it wasn’t necessarily a product of any direct “influence” either. I think the similarities you might draw to various 90s bands result from Torche’s mindset. Calling Torche “90s rock” is a little ambiguous of course, this being 2012. I suppose one could more directly observe that they took a stoner/post-rock sound and made it bright and bubbly, leading to a sort of “stoner pop” novelty. But when you apply the term “pop” to anything but teen idols you’re being just as vague, and furthermore, though Harmonicraft might seem new from a stoner metal perspective, it feels to me refreshingly nostalgic.


Snakes Are Charmed

Frankly, attempting to categorize Harmonicraft does it a disservice. It’s not a band trying to perfect or expand upon x musical style. It expresses more freedom than that. It harkens back to a time when heavier bands emphasized their own individuality, genres be damned. And that’s why it reminds me of rock in the 90s. I wouldn’t even call it metal, any more than I would call Nirvana or The Offspring punk. And as such, I think it stands at the forefront of music today.

The new standard is synthesis. Metal has been pulling it off lately, especially last year, with bands like Falconer putting a professional gloss on the best of many sub-genres rolled into one, while Liturgy, Deafheaven, and company were forging a more personal if sometimes less formidable approach to the same. Here, Torche are bringing it back to rock. Songs like Snakes Are Charmed have all of the immediate appeal of an instant radio staple, yet rather than repeating something stale, they reinvigorate rock through their more contemporary roots. You hear the stoner/doom and post-rock influences not as those styles, but rather as integrated elements of what it is to be a good rock band. The 90s took the metal and punk subspecies defined in the 80s and made it happen. Now here’s a band getting the job done with musical developments of the last 10 to 15 years.

If there’s any one band I could really compare it to, I’d say Boris.


Walk It Off

I actually forgot that Torche and Boris released a split in 2009 and toured together until after I drew the connection. In Walk It Off the influence is most apparent. Wata’s style is hers alone, but you can definitely feel the sort of inspiration she brings bleeding over into Steve Brooks’ own solos. (Or perhaps Andrew Elstner’s. I don’t actually know who plays lead.) But perhaps even more noteworthy, the more I listen to this track the more I feel that, above all else, the solo really resembles Billy Corgan.


Roaming

And this all amounts to a really awkward way of going about an album review. Sometimes that’s inevitable. No amount of describing Harmonicraft from a metal perspective can do it justice, because it really isn’t a metal album. It is, on the one hand, an immediately and undeniably appealing compilation of catchy tunes which utilize various recent musical movements, mostly within the metal sphere of influence, to accomplish the delivery, and on the other hand, a sign of hope. It excites me to see that this trend towards emphasizing synthesis instead of genre expansion is beginning to spill out of metal and into more accessible rock. I’ll be disappointed if Harmonicraft ends up my favorite album of the year. It’s not that kind of album. It bears no strong message in and of itself–lacks the depth of a masterpiece. But if it could, by some twist of fate, become 2012’s most influential creation, I’d not complain.