Sonically Uncoupling

Do you remember what you were doing the first time you heard your favorite band? I was in Cambridge in 2007, chilling in my friend's apartment. I had tickets for the Lawrence Arms, and decided to skip a week of classes to visit friends and catch the show. He had gone to work for the day, and I was on a random message board, reading posts from a few dudes about how the best rock band in the world was a Japanese trio called Boris, named after the Melvins song. 

With a few hours to kill before the show, I jumped down the rabbit hole. I started with "Heavy Rocks", and the nearly flawless "Akuma No Uta" (If you only hear one Boris track, make it "Naki Kyoku") . The more experimental stuff followed through the next few days; the aptly named drone album "Flood", "Boris At Last: Feedbacker", which has got me through a few breakups, and the searing "Amplifier Worship". I finally got around to their most accessible album, "Pink", and was hooked (although I played it for a friend once, and he said it was "too loud"). 

Pretty much everything about Boris at the time appealed to me. Atsuo, the drummer, sort of reminds me of Jay Weinberg's stint in Against Me!. Dude is just on point, and seems to have boundless energy. Wata, probably my favorite guitar player ever, is always dwarfed on stage by her giant tower of Orange amps and cabs. Their work with both Sunn O))) and  Michio Kurihara is incredible, as are the seemingly dozens of studio and live releases with noise legend Merzbow (I was given their "Rock Dream" triple live album as a gift from my friend Danielle for visiting California). The band's versatility as a whole, the way they can drone on and on and then hit you with gigantic stoner rock riffing in one track. Their throwback to early thrashy hardcore days, the album "Vein", just damn. Nothing could go wrong. 

Okay, I know. You're tired of me waxing poetic over these guys. They've been around for so long (almost two decades) that you know who they are. You've probably heard a few tracks. You might even be a fan. 

As time goes on, a band's sound will typically evolve. For Boris, it meant a lot of shoegaze influence, and a little bit of electronic music, and more contemporary pop/J-rock. It trickled in on "My Neighbor Satan", a single from 2008's "Smile" (which, if you liked "Pink", is a great followup). It came to the foreground the following year, with the "Japanese Heavy Rock Hits" series of 7"s. "Black Original", off of Volume 2, was probably the most pop-sounding thing the band had ever done, and was glossed up even more when put on 2011's "New Album". "New Album" isn't entirely a remix album, but does have more dancey and poppy versions of tracks off the other two albums they put out that year, "Attention Please" and "Heavy Rocks" (not to be confused with the 2002 "Heavy Rocks"). Wata's come more to the foreground as a vocalist. 

The problem with this evolution is that it's turned the band's sound into something I pretty much despise. Half of "Akuma No Uta" featured Motorhead-paced songs with Grand Funk Railroad levels of fuzzy guitar. Now they just sort of hit my ears and I think it's the soundtrack to a generic anime series. 

NPR has a stream of their upcoming album, "Noise". I got two tracks in before I turned it off out of lack of interest. I'm sure after a while I'll give it a full listen and think it's not bad, but right now, I need a break.