Boris: Smile
Not to be confused with Brian Wilson
It’s getting hard to keep track of Boris, really. I mean what the hell, they put out an album every month, usually as a collaboration with someone else (most notably SunnO))) and Merzbow). I believe the last thing I heard was Walrus and Groon, though I think the last “proper” Boris full-length would have to be 2005’s Pink. I loved Pink, especially the mopey Justin-Broadrick-like opener “Farewell.” The rest of the album was fairly straightforward 70s-worshipping heavy Boris-ism. If you can call anything they’ve done straightforward or typical.
Smile often still channels the 70s as only Boris can, but don’t call it “straightforward.”
Opener “Message” is a red herring, just like “Farewell,” though not quite to the same degree. It throbs and pulses with a big-ass electronic beat, and plays like a twisted-up heavy metal disco hybrid or (pardon this, trust me it’s good) Boris’s version of LCD Soundsystem.
“Next Saturn” is, for me, the centerpiece of the album, epic and heavy. It breaks down into a vintage-metal mess just when you least expect it, only to come back to moody melodicism and back again full circle.
But the rest of the album, aside from the driving hard psych Boris-jam “Dead Destination,” sounds to me like the culmination of what Boris has been doing over the course of the past few years. Sprawling areas of feedback drones, layers of hissing and slashing noise over top of their hard psych, and — maybe most importantly — liberal doses of spaced-out melody meshed with slow and heavy doom riffing a la “Farewell” combine to make what might be the quintessential Boris album. At least for the moment.
- Mike