Artier than Guitar Wolf, saner than the Boredoms, Boris have carved out a prominent niche within hipster metal with a combination of muscular rock and abstract drone.Here's Boris's simple stage: A long-haired dude in a Harvey Milk t-shirt with a headless, double-necked bass/guitar; a woman looking Dolores O'Riordan-tiny behind her ax; and an even longer-haired drummer in an open-chested animal-print shirt with an enormous Zildjian gong mounted behind him. If you've been into Pink since its Japanese release, you don't know the names of the songs because they all show up as strings of squares on your iPod, but you recognize the snarling bass grooves and bowel-rumbling sheets of guitar; the shifts between melodic thrash and portentous drone; Wata's bravura shredding.
Boris played "Pink" and "Electric" at the ridiculous volume and frantic pace their stuttering fuzz-riffs demanded, yet made room amid the mayhem for delicate, pensive ambient sections where you could decompress and cough up some of the viscous riffage pooling in the lungs. The vocals didn't add much to the music but were indispensable to the performance as a reminder of the body, something frangible amid the superhuman roar. Virtuosic yet egoless, streamlined and unaffected, Boris tapped into metal's raw power while shedding its more acquired-taste, genre-specific trappings (i.e. the Cookie Monster vocals and fantastical embellishments), uniting Knut and Arcade Fire fans under one roof. Can world peace be far behind?
