![]() A pop song can look like a pop song, but that doesn't mean it is one. During these stretches, you can hear the band struggling to write songs from outside their area of expertise. The sketchy, dorky techno pop of Attention Please's "Les Paul Custom '86" and Heavy Rocks' Jackson Head" annoy (Boris as 8-Bit Muse?). The slow, stoned bedroom-psych of the new song "Pardon?" bores. ![]() Here, the experiments too often come off as empty or forced: Decadent on the surface, hollow at the core. ![]() Drummer/vocalist Atsuo told Rolling Stone the two albums that provided much of the source material were put together from "one abandoned record." You don't often see Boris short on ideas, largely because they can't seem to let them go- even if they're running them into the ground. ![]() (The original appeared on Adult Swim's Metal Swim compilation.) The other real standout- kinetic, sunburst opener "Flare"- didn't appear elsewhere before New Album.īut not everything works so well. The best song, though, is "Luna", a rush of gurgling, humming dynamics that continues to hectically spiral upward for its eight minutes and change, creating soaring, stringed, crunchy goodness. You also get this in the shredding, cascading guitars of the amped "Tu, La La" and the mellower closer, "Looprider", a new track that comes off like Boris doing Yo La Tengo (via Sonic Youth). In this case, as with NA's other best moments, Boris leave remnants of their usual sound within the gentler field: Bigger-than-twee drums, flanged feedback, and a heavy bass hold the elements together. "Spoon" offers a swirl of shoegaze detailed with chimes, synthesizers, atmospheric female vocals, and various bright, shiny things. When the formula does succeed, the results do dazzle. But in most cases, it's more a comment on the quality of the other records than a heap of praise for this one. ![]() All of the Attention Please and Heavy Rocks tracks sound better here- chewier, more refined nuggets. The band usually self-produces its records but brought on mainstream dance/pop arranger and producer Shinobu Narita, and the guy has a way with Candy Land gloss. (It makes more sense than you might want to assume that they recently toured with New York City dream-pop group Asobi Seksu.)Ĭonceptually, they were inspired by the use of Vocaloid software in Japanese pop music: the program takes typed lyrics and turns them into a song sung by "an imaginary anime character vocalist." New Album does have the feel of sumptuous, otherworldly animation. The band insists on labeling this new angle "extreme," though only because it's an extreme shift by a group best known for its doom metal and fuzzed-out rock. The 10-song collection, first released in Japan this past March before this rearranged/remastered version, is their most unabashed pop experiment offering a dollop of sugary atmospherics and dewy hooks. Atsuo (drums/vocals), Wata (guitar/vocals), and Takeshi (bass/vocals) were quiet after 2008's forgettable grab-bag Smile, but they've made up for the silence with three 2011 releases, Attention Please, Heavy Rocks (which echoes the 2002 release of the same name), and New Album, a generically titled collection that reinterprets tracks from those other records: "Party Boy", "Hope", "Spoon", and "Les Paul Custom '86" from AP "Jackson Head" and "Tu, La La" from HR II. ![]()
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