Year Of Metal #106: Boris - Heavy Rocks (2022)
I love Boris, the venerable Japanese drone-doom-ambient-whatever act. Or at any rate, I love Boris as much as anyone with finite time on their hands can realistically love them - in their near-30 years of active duty, they’ve released 29 studio LPs under their own banner, plus a cavalcade of collaborative records, splits, and live albums. So: what I’ve heard is great. Their core form is that of a loud, weird stoner act - 1998’s idiotically sludgy and aptly named Amplifier Worship is perhaps the first key text - but they’ve been all around the houses since then, as you probably would when your career spans literal dozens of recordings.
Their series of Heavy Rocks albums is as good an access point as any. My favourite is the 2002 version, but we’re looking at the third here, released in 2022. Unlike some of their particularly cavernous offerings, Heavy Rocks benefits from distinct songs, rather than one enormous onslaught of noise. They’re in unusually energetic form on opener “She Is Burning”, whose first 30 seconds is about as close as a song can come to completely falling apart without actually doing so. Along with the hardcore drums and rumbling bass is the odd burst of triumphant mariachi horn. A subtle band Boris aren’t (for the most part) and this is the aural equivalent of being shaken awake by some well meaning but terrifyingly boisterous party animals.
They calm it down on occasion across the record but they’re capable of returning to this intensity at the drop of a hat, to slightly mixed results. “Ghostly Imagination” tries a few too many things - those classical guitar heroics and a dance beat and death screams, all of which don’t quite come together. These aren’t the band to listen to when you’ve got a headache, but there’s a difference between exacerbating a migraine and causing one.
“My Name Is Blank”, on the other hand, sees the band in much firmer control of their attack. They’re in old school heavy metal mode here, but with a patented Boris spin. It’s as though someone fed Judas Priest into a drone - they chug away at one chord for bars on end, until the basic fundamentals of hard rock become hypnotic. It’s not surprising a sub genre of music with such emphasis on precision is so suited to this band - they get right inside the riff, taking a measure’s worth of music and stretching it out and out.
They’re at their most ur-Boris sound on “Nosferatu”, a great lumbering doomy five minutes with peels of feedback, endless scorched guitar chords, and intermittent rushes of drumming with maximum revert, like a Neanderthal is thwacking away in a cave. Befitting of the title, it’s a particularly spooky cut; they seem to chuck away the mids altogether in favour of rumbling riffs and screeching, Can-like horns. The album’s perhaps at its best, though, when Boris focus on the Rocks rather than the Heavy. The frantic, hooky “Cramper” might be the standout tune, with a glossy stop-start structure, unusually clear vocals, and immense momentum without veering into chaos.
Boris certainly have better albums - indeed they released a finer effort, W. that same year. But for a sharp and fun taster, this serves as a great introduction to a fantastic band. You get the gravel and the noise without feeling like you’ve spent over an hour listening to a single chord melt an amplifier, which helps as a way in. They’ve been more outre and inventive, but a slightly workmanlike Boris is a hell of a lot more interesting than most other bands firing on all creative cylinders.
