Is it possible to be completely impartial? Theoretically it is within human capability to do so, but in practise I assume that Arcade Fire are overrated despite never having heard anything by them. That also effectively explains my grudge against anime. Two of my favorite movies are Snatch and The Departed because of all the things they don’t have in common with anime, and one of the things that makes these movies inviting is that they aren’t mentioned all the time and don’t have whole sections of the Internet and Google Images dedicated to them. Also, the way the Earth seems to be divided into USA!!!11, everything else and JAPAN!!!111 makes me tend to root for everything else.
I must say, though, that I’m glad I let my skepticism slide from time to time. After all, Boris is like The Beatles if The Beatles didn’t give a fuck, thus making it the coolest band in existence. They are group of fantastic musicians who know how to churn out something good, and when they want to, they churn out stuff that is almost life-changing, but they prefer sticking to being merely good. It’s like they practise making incredible music just so that they can not record it afterwards. That being so, what makes or breaks a Boris album are the instances when they accidentally make something awesome, and Amplifier Worship has a lot of those. The way the album is written makes it sound like it was initially a lot better, and had to be worsened so that people wouldn’t die from overexposure to magnificence. It is consistently promising, but only delivers whenever, and ends up kind of disappointing. Nevertheless, understand that I don’t mean that it doesn’t leave an impression, because leaving an impression is Boris’s middle name, or... uh... might have been.
Amplifier Worship has a rather slow start with the comparatively unimpressive “Huge”, moving on to the chunky and powerful “Ganbow-Ki”, with its crushing beginning and mesmerizing ending, followed by the ultra-aggressive “Hama”; “Kuruimizu” comes afterwards and takes the aggression of the previous song to its limit, but has a rather misplaced post-rockish ending, and “Vomitself” closes the album with some very hypnotic and trippy pure drone. In a nutshell, this release is badass. I can almost feel my beard grow when I listen to it. Meanwhile, the combination of and excellent sound and a fleet of rhythmic intricacies means that it’s very rare for the music to become boring, despite being a mixture of some of the slowest and most boredom-prone genres in history. Not only that, but when the music mellows down, it doesn’t just turn mellow, it becomes as beautiful as the likes of Explosions In The Sky or Sigur Rós. When Boris decide to do something, they do it better than the pros.
Yet, I feel disappointed. It feels like Amplifier Worship is not complete. It gives you a taste of everything, but it doesn’t really give much more than a taste, and it never sticks to anything long enough to actually achieve its full potential. I wish it were mindblowing, and all the elements to make it so are there, but it’s not mindblowing. It’s just promising. It’s only very good. It’s amazing how these guys manage to always keep one interested without actually giving much of interest. I don’t think they would have even gotten much recognition had they come from some other country, but the recognition they get, they certainly deserve.
Standout tracks:
Ganbow-Ki
Hama
Kuruimizu
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