Don't Hate The Players, Hate Your Eardrums! Boris' Pink Album

For Serious Masochists Only

Boris' Pink is simply a disgustingly noisy album. They are a power trio from Tokyo. Takeshi sings and plays Bass and Guitar. Wata is on Guitar and Echo. Atsuo is on drums and percussion. If you love blissfully pummelling loud noise, you probably should not continue another second without this album. If you don't share those sympathies, this album would be a great example to persuade the sceptical how beautiful noise can be. The album is a crazy mix of musical genres, metal, shoegaze, garage rock, hardcore, grunge, drone rock experimentalism. Whatever they may be doing at any given time, this album makes my eardrums tingle. That is, before the blood begins to trickle out. I have three of their albums but this one is my personal favorite.



Even though this is mighty room saturating blast of sound, the music is nuanced, with tempo changes, and artful manipulation of volume, going from softer to louder in an eyeblink. Beneath the noise cloud there seems to be a fair amount of melodious music.While the first song Farewell is an almost ambient My Bloody Valentine excursion, the second song Pink is a hard riffing highly kinetic blast of Black Sabbath meets the Stooges. Woman On The Screen is MC5 on steroids. Wata is simply amazing--a poster of her should be hanging on the wall of every teenage Metalhead from Tokyo to Tacoma. This is simply an example of taking extreme forms of music from rock history and bumping the stakes up a few more notches. This music bowls the competition over with an almost religious fervor, as though they recorded this album from inside a moving tank.

The Perfect Woman?

This album just stuns me completely. The music is so beautiful, like a more traditional riff ready version of Bailter Space. In other places Boris even remind me of the stoned controlled feedback Kiwis Dead C. The final song on Pink is the 18 minute just Abondoned Myself which is an over the top epic blast of distortion.

Like a damned death star blowing up. A perfect Christmas for the noise aficionado, or you can give the gift of tinnitus to someone you hate. An extremely cool band who appear to be musicologists with a sense of humor. If you've seen the ironic Nick Drake inspired cover of their album Akuma No Uta you know what I mean. They have also collaborated with the likes of Ghost's Michio Kurihara and The Cult's Ian Astbury.

I used to play this in my old office when I was by myself and it just seemed to get louder and louder as the cd progressed. I always had to keep turning it down. If you like bands like Sonic Youth, the Detroit bands I previously mentioned, Jesus and Mary Chain, Xterminator era Primal Scream, Foetus, Wire, Ministry, Gordons, you will be quite pleased by this big slab of molten distortion.