Heavy Rocks
The legendary BORIS celebrate a 30 year career as one of experimental music's most forward-thinking, heavy, and innovative bands with the new album Heavy Rocks (2022). Continuing their series of Heavy Rocks records, BORIS once again channels the classic proto-metal sounds of the 70s into something all new. The album, 10 pulse-pounding tracks, highlight the very trajectory of BORIS and their storied career - from the driving, fuzzed out Rock N' Roll opener "She is Burning", to the punk, raucous "My Name is Blank", BORIS are heavier than ever before. "Question 1" is just kickass - D-beats give way to a doomed, spaced out and heavier-than-anything guitar wailing and feedback, before diving back into their Metal, sending the listener into a complete frenzy. This is unmistakably BORIS, and this is the band at the height of their powers. Elsewhere on the record, a more daring, "out there" side of the band begins to shine on tracks such as the aptly titled "Blah Blah Blah", the industrial "Ghostly Imagination" and the truly wild "Nosferatou". Noisy passages (not unlike prior collaborations with legendary artists like Merzbow,) collide with visceral vocal howls while a relentless, almost Zornian-saxophone shreds harder than any guitar solo ever could. In 2022, BORIS cement what Heavy Rock means to them, and release one of their most captivating records to date.
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Tokyo's BORIS has been kicking out their insane, one-of-a-kind jams for 30 years now, winnowing down from a quintet to a power trio but inversely increasing their bombastic and sonic impact as they did so. Their voyage finds them delving into terrain that's heavy and noisy on one end, ambient and pe...
"After a couple hundred releases, it's pretty much a guarantee that this isn't the end of this boundary pushing band and hopefully not the end of the Heavy Rocks series."
It seems that in whatever direction Boris follows their wayward muse – drone, shoegaze, harsh noise – at some point every decade or so, the Japanese trio will throw out an anchor called Heavy Rocks to reconnect–if not with the mainstream, then at least with conventional ideas of music.
If Boris have proven anything during their 30 year existence, it’s that the fairly humble rock'n'roll project knows no constraints and allows for a myriad of diversified approaches. Playing with clichés and stereotypes as much as experimenting with studio space and texture, the trio have furnished a catalogue of seemingly inexhaustible euphoria and variety of