The Tokyo-based trio Boris celebrated thirty years creating music and sound together this year, and what better way for them to revel in their epic legacy than by releasing three full-length albums in 2022? (Read our reviews of W and Heavy Rocks.) Fade is the latest, which came as a surprise release with no prior announcement, and the six tracks ignite a listener’s imagination, plunging you into a sort of psychedelic meditation. Through their three decades as a band, Boris have either defied categorization or over-inspired it. Their music has been described as experimental rock, noise, avant-garde metal, doom metal, post-metal, drone metal, sludge metal, psych rock, shoegaze, dreampop, and crust punk, among many other possible sub-genres and their sound often changes album to album. Fade also resists simple classification, and is most certainly experimental, with elements of many of those genres woven throughout, but with a distinct focus on drone metal.
The album’s six tracks are presented in “chapters,” with a prologue and epilogue, and an unrecorded afterword that exists only as sensation (at least to this listener). Just like enjoying a surreal novel, Fade invites you to explore other worlds. So close your eyes, listen, visualize, and get lost in the layers of Boris’ sound.
The first track, “Prologue Sensaro” (Sensaro means “three-forked road” or “junction of three roads” in Japanese) immediately immerses you in an undulating wall of guitar noise and electronica. Wata, Boris’ much-lauded guitarist holds court, joined by Takeshi, who usually plays bass (or switches between guitar and bass), but here both Wata and Takeshi are unleashing a swirling curtain of guitar sound feeding back on itself in pulsing waves. Atsuo (who on other albums also offers masterful metalesque vocals) is primarily adding to the soundscape on electronics, with occasional bursts of drums establishing momentary rhythmic grooves within the sonic maelstrom.
“Prologue Sensaro” also has a gorgeous and hypnotizing video featuring camera work and editing by Ryuta Murayama. The video sees Wata in a stunning Bjorkian costume made of what looks like moonbeam cellophane. The original fifteen plus minutes of the song are cut down to just over nine minutes, but you still have plenty of time to sink to the ocean floor and swim just under the surface with a scantily-clad-yet-very-goth female figure who may be the sexiest sea witch this planet has to offer.
The thick layers of guitar noise continue in “Howling Moon, Melting Sun” (which also clocks in at around fifteen minutes), with aggressive extended chords roiling while high-pitched electronic vibrations swirl above. At times, one can hear voices within the storm. It’s hard to tell what is the moon here and what is the sun, but if celestial bodies began to howl and bend and melt around each other, I’m pretty sure this is what it would sound like.
“Michikusa” (which in Japanese means to dawdle or waste time) is a shorter track, the softest on the album, with floating synth and electronic sounds that again create the sensation of voices or even whale songs, but it cuts off abruptly because “nanji, sashidasareta te wo tsukamu bekarazu” is coming. (Translation: “when you should not grab the outstretched hand.”) Fade’s fourth song (but third chapter) unleashes the uncontrollable beast that is Wata’s brutal guitar sound again here, like an unrelenting monster that is stomping its giant feet, causing mammoth earthquakes and breaking the world apart. If this thing offers its hand to you, well yeah, I’d advise against taking it.
The aftermath of the monster is “Marine Snow,” a wall of fuzzy guitar noise much like the blizzard suggested by this fourth chapter’s title. Like witnessing a frozen tornado above the ocean, you can hear the wind and waves in this track, the power of the sky meeting the power of the sea. But once again, after one final crash, the song ends abruptly, and it’s time for the epilogue.
Boris signed tour Polaroid
“A Bao A Qu–Infinite Corridor” begins with the slow twinkling notes of an old music box that seems to summon all of the rotating cosmos as big thick guitar chords erupt again, pulsing through static, like the beacons of light shooting out from a space-age city in Fade’s cover art. In the middle of the song we hear a fluttering of cymbals, and again, distant indecipherable voices calling out to the night. “A Bao A Qu” references a mythical creature from literature that originally appeared in Arabian Nights, and again in Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, and Boris has recorded three earlier versions of the song—on 2004’s The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked, 2005’s Mabata No Ura (a soundtrack from an imaginary film), and 2014’s The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked Extra. This newest iteration of the song is the longest of the four recorded, offering a triumphant cacophony for fourteen and a half minutes, until the thunderous layers of sound suddenly burn out. But Boris’ beautiful noise continues to smolder in your mind, like being buried in marine snow (the afterword).
Fade has served as my introduction to the intricate, diverse, and stunningly impressive body of work that Boris has shared with the world over the past thirty years, and I’m definitely now a fan. I missed their live show at Webster Hall back in September (but our EIC was there, see below for her pics from the show), but I’m hoping they will return to New York soon. In the meantime, I will go explore their mammoth discography and continue to get joyously lost in Fade.
For those familiar with Lung, there had been 414 days of holding their breath. After the powerhouse 2017 debut Bottom of the Barrel and its 2018 follow up, All The King’s Horses, August 20th, 2021 saw the release of Come Clean Right Now, a smashing third release from the Cincinnati, OH duo, which consists of vocalist/cellist Kate Wakefield and drummer Daisy Caplan. After Clean not only lived up to, but improved on the stunning first two albums, no one could help but look forward to even more. But fortunately the wait wasn’t long and everyone got to breathe air into their lungs after only a little over a year with the release of Let It Be Gone, their most accessible album yet. Wakefield and Caplan, however, had been waiting much, much longer to release Gone.
The duo share that the album “took a long time to really form itself,” but also add that “it feels like it’s coming out right on time. Over 30 songs were considered for it, we reordered the tracks and remastered it three times. It finally feels like the album it should be, and it wouldn’t have been if it came out as soon as we recorded it,” says Caplan. The duo also recognize that its fully formed final incarnation arrived right on time with Wakefield adding “I feel like this album is strangely more relevant now [than when it was written]. There is a line that is in one of our songs, ‘Miles Per Hour,’ to be free is to give in to a life worth living in, with all of the changes in the last few years, that line really rings true to me. The need for music, connection and purpose are stronger now. The need to actively live, rather than just numb the senses with whatever vice is in the nearest reach, feels strong.”
Nothing about Lung can be seen as ordinary. Their instrumentation as a sole cello/drum power duo and their eclectic style which mixes indie, prog, punk, metal, goth, classical, and opera make them one of the most unique bands out there. On top of this, they craft songs that can easily be sung or hummed along with. Take “Her Voice Is What Follows,” which contains the catchiest cello riff of all time (sorry Apocalyptica), and there’s a song that can be as stuck in one’s head as a pop song but is still this distinctive mix of styles. So it should come as no surprise that their album chronology is not ordinary either. This release was actually written before Clean, in the ancient time of the pre-Covid era. The nautical theme that permeates the album draws parallels to Lung’s life on the road in 2018-2019, when they were relentlessly touring, and settling down in one location seemed impossible.
Caplan states that this album was written with the idea that home isn’t a set place, but the road itself, or wherever one happens to be at a given time. He elaborated saying: “The album’s theme is a general movement away from the idea of home as a place, i.e. Cincinnati, OH or wherever, and more of the road itself as a home wherever you are (or aren’t) at a given time. We were traveling a lot on tour, and in our absence our homes changed, people changed, times changed. Touring gives you a unique vantage point to places you don’t live as well as places you do—by popping in at intervals, you see gradual changes happen in fast motion, while you remain in stasis.”
With the ocean still being so unexplored, using being lost at sea as a metaphor for life on the road brings in a mystical factor that couldn’t fit better with Lung’s metaphysical sounding music. Album highlight “Siren Song,” adding in Wakefield’s haunting vocalizations and lyrics which sound as if she’s a bard singing the epic journey of Odysseus, perfectly exemplifies the mythical feel of the record.
Despite the album sounding as if it came from Poseidon-cursed, Siren-filled waters, it is not about an ancient hero or a far away deity, but about Wakefield and Caplan themselves. The nomadic concept is not just a theme, but an honest feeling they are trying to convey, something that is a part of them. “And I feel it coming from my bones,” Wakefield sings on the closing track, “Bones” as if she’s begging the listener to understand that the feelings of this album are coming from an extremely deep place.
When the pandemic hit and the band was in quarantine, Come Clean Right Now’s release resonated because it sounded like a fit of rage against the walls closing in. Let It Be Gone underwent various changes through its journeyed early life, but was also biding its time until it could be released when its nomadic nature could feel honest again. To Caplan, Gone is a time capsule, invoking that feeling of the pre-pandemic time for the band, saying “Largely because of the pandemic, people tend to forget that 2017-2019 was not the rosiest of times for much of anyone, and the ensuing chaos only exacerbated problems that already existed. As it became a “normal” to get back to, many of the difficulties of the time were erased in the collective memory. This album is a direct portraiture of our collective experiences in those times and so much has happened in the intervening three years that it’s become kind of an instant time capsule. It’s a historical document of a time period we haven’t quite left, but still seems like a different world. It’s like reading a novel with eerie parallels to your own life.”
Although the pandemic is supposedly “over ” and things are “normal” again, many people now have a feeling of uncertainty, that nothing is forever, that everyone is wandering through life without any solid home. Wakefield and Caplan strike a chord with everyone feeling this way, using incredibly unique music to do it, and have thus created an album that will be appreciated for many, many more years than it took to find its release and its new nomadic home amongst the ever growing world of Lung fans.
Let It Be Gone is out now via Romanus Records and available on all major streaming services.
It’s not too often we get an indie pop rock record with this much organic swagger. But record label Trash Casual has a reputation for strictly releasing records that scream authenticity and Wabi-Sabi is no exception.
According to their Spotify bio, the band is described as “Employing lush, hypnotizing guitars, reverb-drenched melodies, and an arsenal of diverse, heady instrumentation, the NYC-based dream-pop singer/producer spins a web of 60’s inspired dreamscapes that bring the tensions down and the tranquility up.”
The LP exists less as a mere collection of songs and more as a carefully constructed universe of the artist’s imagination. Over the years Shiitake has become extremely skilled at surrounding himself with talented collaborators and possesses quite a knack for setting up the the proper environment for a killer song to present itself. That’s the world of Papi Shiitake, and that’s the space we are invited to occupy on Wabi-Sabi.
From the very opening track, “Punch Buggy,” you can feel a summery sadness like sinking your toes into the sandy shores of something that’s just slipped away. The vocal delivery throughout the album has a relaxed vibe to it that feels both extremely welcoming and painfully real. Mellotron-drenched “Mountains Red” and groove-driven “Mexican Moonlight” wash over us like a dark soulful wave, leaving us exposed to feel Papi in those specific moments. It’s beautifully rare that an artist can so honestly take us back to such a particular emotional instance, to capture a fleeting moment and build a space around it to exist and breathe.
Wabi Sabi is full of these complex truthful moments. Sometimes it veers a bit from the somber towards introspective acceptance as we see on the sleepy melancholy-adjacent highlight track, “Hideaway.” Other times it doubles down on the tragic beauty like on the powerful closer “Do What You Say.” Shiitake told Buzz Music, “Before every relationship ends there’s this moment when something turns inside of you. You realize that it’s over, but you’re still in it. There’s such power and sadness at that moment. What once was so bright has dimmed and the cold night is fast approaching.”
Papi Shiitake has spent years in and out of musical projects, traveling both geographically and artistically to find his own voice. I’m probably best acquainted with his previous garage/pop/surf band, Best Behavior. But in 2020, he turned a corner with Quarantine Dream, an EP that allowed Shiitake to break out and approach things with a whole new foundation of freedom. The result was Wabi-Sabi, a bigger and more confident record that serves to take even further down the rabbit hole of Shiitake’s swagger and maybe catch a little sunshine along the way.
Wabi-Sabi is out now via Trash Casual and available on all major streaming services.
Hi! Hello! Here we are with some bite sized goodies and a taste of a some new things that we dug that came out in the last week(ish), quick fire responses to some great new music we think you should check out. This week Kate and Mike weighed in on some killer songs— give ’em a listen!
Chubby and the Gang– Violent Night/A Christmas Tale/Red Rag to a Bull. If you ask me, any time of year is the right time of year for some rock n fucking roll and why not especially so for the Christmas season? London based power pop punksters Chubby and the Gang have blessed us with just such a thing and released their take on the Holidays with “A Christmas Extravaganza,” a hard rocking, fast driving double single featuring one Christmas tune and one non holiday tune that still rips regardless. Listen to both songs below. [KH]
Guts Club– Change My Name. The heavy doom gaze/post metal trio have shared the third and final single from their upcoming album, CLIFFS/WALLS, and it builds upon the swirling barrage of feedback and doom of the first two singles, “The Gun Collector” and “CLIFFS/WALLS,” and even without having heard the final songs from the album, this trio of songs fully feels intentional and like the prelude to an entire album concept instead of just some songs thrown together on a release because they were written or recorded at the same time. This band does massive walls of noise so well and they also do emotion—LOTS OF EMOTION—perhaps even better with vocalist Lindsey Baker drilling deep into your soul with her screams of anguish surging in and out and in between the gales of feedback that form the vibrating heart of the song.
The band says via a press release that “‘Change My Name’ is a love song about “wading through a loved one’s profound grief. Grief takes on many forms and can alter the trajectory of one’s life and relationships. The song is a reflection on how obsessive love can manifest from intense grief.”
CLIFFS/WALLS releases in full 1/13/23. [KH]
Lily Mao & the Resonators– Tiger. Hot off the presses is the snarky new tune from Lily Mao & the Resonators and it gets right to the point. Following this Fall’s “Wolves,” Mao continues to lead the pack as one of Brooklyn’s most unique voices. The quiet confidence of lyrical metaphor goes head-to-head with with some rippin’ guitar, proving once again a tiger cannot change its stripes… nor would it want to. This was released in collaboration with A Diamond Heart Production. [MB]
Maraschino– Walking On Thin Ice (Yoko Ono cover). LA based electro pop artist Piper Durabo aka Maraschino is due to release her new album Hollywood Piano in March (read our thoughts on the single “Hi Desire”), and separate from that has just released a Bandcamp exclusive cover of Yoko Ono’s airy 1981 classic, “Walking On Thin Ice.” On why she wanted to cover the song, Maraschino says “‘Walking on Thin Ice’ is one of my favorites in Yoko’s catalog. It’s a timeless ripper, and the lyrics are amazing. The erratic nature of life and death, “throwing the dice in the air” and hoping for the best, and the conclusion that “when our hearts return to ashes, it’ll be just a story” kinda sums it all up, you know?”
Listen to both versions below. [KH]
Narrow Head– Gearhead. This band does the hazy grungegaze sound so well, I almost swear I’m back in the waning days of summer 1995 when I got my first taste of You’d Prefer An Astronaut. While this band does draw heavily on influences from the 90s and I hear a lot of Hum’s (and Deftones) influence in their sound, they are firmly of the now and stand shoulder to shoulder with the earlier pioneers of heavy shoegaze. This song is from their upcoming album Moments of Clarity (2/10/23 Run For Cover), and I’m very much looking forward to what the entire body of work has to offer. They’ll be touring in support of the album, but thus far only on the West Coast. Here’s hoping a return to NYC is in the works soon.
R. Ring– Def Sup. This is the second single from the upcoming album War Poems/We Rested, by the project which features Kelley Deal (The Breeders), Mike Montgomery (Ampline) and Laura King (Bat Fangs) and it’s a slinky groover, leaning heavily on a sexy bass line and sultry beat with pointed, acidic guitar lines adding tart accents throughout.
King shared about the song: “I had this beat in my head and I recorded it with Charles Chace (Speed Stick) at his Beep Wave Studio. We chopped it up a bit, then I recorded a bass track that seemed fitting. Charles added some angular guitar solos. I knew then that I had to take the tracks to Mike and Kelley to finish the song. They painted their magic on it and it really started to take shape and make sense. The words came from the excitement of a new relationship and promising self identity.”
War Poems/We Rested is due out via Don Giovanni on 1/27/23. [KH]
Ron Gallo– Yucca Valley Marshalls. Sometimes all we need is something that feels familiar, even if it’s the sharp fluorescent glow of a big box store off in the distance. On this latest track, we find the clever songwriter Gallo reflecting on a solo west coast trip where he found himself wandering around Los Angeles by himself, finding that it can be “the loneliest place on the planet if you are an outsider.” Elaborating further, he says “I took that feeling with me on a day trip to Joshua Tree and ended up stopping at the Marshalls in Yucca Valley. There’s something really sad and hilarious about seeing a glowing Marshalls sign in the middle of the desert but since chain stores are all the same inside I took it as an opportunity for some familiarity.
An astutely observational and masterfully sardonic lyricist, the new album promises to take us on a journey as Gallo “screams at the developers turning neighborhoods into unremarkable AirBnB advertisements, corporate overlords deciding how much music costs, and extremists hellbent on bringing forth an apocalypse of racial and civil destruction. It confronts the villains of our society and helps those crushed by them by finding a way to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
The album will released in full on 3/3/23 via Kill Rock Stars and a tour will follow, with stops at SXSW and hitting Brooklyn on 4/6 at Baby’s All Right. [KH]
Skull Practitioners– Exit Wounds. The NYC post-punk-psych-garage-rock trio have just announced their debut full length, Negative Stars, and released the first single, “Exit Wounds.” With the guitar sound of Jason Victor leading the charge and backed by the rock solid rhythm section of Kenneth Levine on bass and Alex Baker on drums, this first taste of the album is full of busy sounds twisting and swirling around each other in a perfectly frantic romp, coming close to the edge of chaos but never full on colliding into disordered cacophony.
All three members of the band share vocal duties throughout their songs, trading off on lead; this one sees Victor front and center on vocals. The release comes with a trippy animated video which pairs perfectly with the song. Negative Stars arrives in full on 1/20/23 via In The Red. Read more about the band and their process for the album here. [KH]
Slift– Unseen. The French psych greats have released a double single as part of Sub Pop’s singles club. The songs were recorded during the Ummon sessions and serve as a continuation/companion piece to the album, with the band elaborating on Bandcamp: “We recorded ‘Unseen’ at the end of the UMMON sessions. We had time left and we had this track that was originally supposed to be on the record, but that we had put aside later. This song was recorded live in one shot, then we added the vocals later. At the end of the song, we started to play with the feedback of the room, and we let ourselves be carried away by this drone. On re-listening, we loved it and for us it was clear, this piece of meditative sound was ‘The Real Unseen.’”
If you’ve had the opportunity to see the Daniels’ film Everything Everywhere All At Once, you understand the lack of inherent meaning is the very thing that makes all things equally meaningful. The Brooklyn noise-punk trio that FTA’s very own EIC describes as a “frantic noise punk band that sounds like Brainiac and Hella had a baby that was raised by no wave wolves on acid,” is the musical equivalent of that very same ethos.
As the band tells us via a press release, they: “Meld the angular dissonance of 1970’s post-punk and no wave with the brash presentation and theatricality of glam rock, unpredictable math rock grooves, and tribal group percussion, Pons is a band that embodies deconstruction and refuses to compartmentalize its influences; A sonic deluge that is rivaled by few in its throttling intensity and leaves only the luckiest of eardrums unscathed.”
Welcome to The Pons Estate; a six-track barrage of harsh melodies and percussive abrasion that unfolds more like a journey through the imagination of 3D space than it does your standard EP.
“While the group’s confrontational and unhinged modus operandi often leads to comparisons to artists such as Death Grips, Swans, and The Stooges, Pons is a band that consistently defies comparison and creates music that truly resists.” And indeed, their sound can’t be nailed down to just one thing, a no wave fury that sees elements of noise, grunge, post-punk, surf, metal, glam and more weaving throughout their sonic tapestry.
The trio functions well without bass by employing two drummers—Jack Parker sitting at a traditional kit and Sebastian Carnot with a standing kit sans bass drum— who together provide a bedrock of percussion allowing the barrage of guitar and vocals from Sam Cameron to spill over the hefty wall of noise. It’s an all out non-stop bombardment of start-stop blast beat chaos that’s just mathy enough to cause confusion, loud enough to keep your ears ringing the next day, and so intense, just watching them is exhausting.
There is a very conscious and deliberate effort to take “the ethos of classic glam rock and rock n’ roll [and filter it] through Pons’ angular and alien lens to create and vibrant and sprawling six track EP the leads the listener on a journey through the various rooms of band’s frightening and alluring estate.”
Highlights include polyrhythmic freakout “SEVEN ATE NINE,” which is the perfect exposition of their many layers, striking all your nerves at once as your synaptic pathways form new connections and your brain finds sonic equilibrium. Whereas “HUNGAHUNGA” relentlessly jerks you back and forth—the whiplash-inducing track rides like an old wooden roller coaster click clacking through the drops and held together by nothing but a series of rusty pins.
To fully experience Pons though, it’s imperative you catch their live show. Not only is it in my opinion the only true setting that can capture the crucial visceral component of their sound (the studio can only do so much to contain the frenetic energy of a band like this after all), but their live show also employs swords, snakes and other theatrics that feel like a twisted adventure of Zelda; I’m plugged in and ready for the ride!
The Pons Estate was self-released and is available on all major streaming platforms, cassettes are available for pre-order via Insecurity Hits. The band will play a release show on Sunday 12/18 at The Sultan Room with Venus Twins, Lip Critic and ID Sus.
London based drummer/experimental composer Valentina Magaletti’s prolific 2022 has seen her tackle a range of projects and ends (maybe??) with one more, the two-song, compact, flexidisc release called Permanent Draft. Magaletti says on her Bandcamp page:
“Conceived as a manifesto for eponymous all-female label Permanent Draft, this limited flexi comes with a booklet of poetry and pictures based on the prime number 13.
Permanent Draft aims to highlight works showing a certain taste for fragmentary, irrepressible creative eruption and lo-fi experiments. Leaving the grandiose apart to pay and bring attention to the sounds, details and anecdotes of everyday life, picking up raw material from the ordinary.
Bitter truths, migrainous fulfilments, dead clowns, broken gods, taffeta fairies, fruit foxes and non-binary empty frames outline these very aesthetics.”
Working with French author Fanny Chiarello, Magaletti composed and performed the musical portions of the two works while Chiarello wrote and voiced the texts. In the first composition, “Migraine,” Chiarello is heard repeating English phrases such as “Make it special” as Magaletti plays intense and musical tom-tom patterns overlaid with dexterous brass touches on the ride cymbal and hi-hat. Other spoken phrases from Chiarello repeat and weave throughout. Magaletti adds programmed sound-effect elements that add depth and color to her percussion. This is followed by “the Bitter Truth,” a brief and sparse piano melody over which Chiarello speaks in French.
More inscrutable and tantalizing brief compared with her other works from this year, Permanent Draft nonetheless shows Magaletti to be a restless and unstoppable creative force. Whether solo or in collaboration, she is a relentless artist, seemingly finding inspiration all around her. Permanent Draft is the definition of leaving the audience wanting more, despite her prolificness this year. Stay tuned to what she has in store in 2023.
