Boris is not a band for everyone. Scratch that, yes they are; in fact, they’re a band for every boy and girl, senior citizen, homeless person, drug addict, hippie, philosopher, politician and cab driver who lives atop the geosphere. What happens though is that few are willing to admit how profoundly each osseous fiber of their being resonates with such unabashedly harrowing noise.
I can already imagine the dozens of greasy smiles forming across the lips of all you well-read kids, kvlt kids, hipsters and the rest, rejoicing in the knowledge that you listen to something more dissonant, more avant-garde more, complicated, intellectual or abrasive than Boris. And yes, I’m sure that must be true. But the implications of this music are more profound than that. Because it’s easy to listen to Schoënberg or Varèse and feel intellectual, it’s easy to listen to punk rock and feel like a “nihilist,” just as easy as it is to spend weeks on obscure forums speaking with various bizarre Belarusian folks in precarious English in order to obtain the newest demo from band X#666 belonging to the new revivalist wave of whatever your personal favorite subgenre happens to be, and feeling like you’re part of an elitist underground cult. What is truly difficult is to listen to music that reminds you that you are nothing.
Careful now, don’t misinterpret me, this isn’t some violent nihilistic declaration of meaningless. Boris would never make such a declaration. In fact, Boris doesn’t seem terribly fond of declaring much. Boris doesn’t want to tell you how to be, much less how they are, so don’t seek shelter here you frail vagabonds and castaways! It also isn’t a question of spiritual unity or meditative transcendence; such pretensions have no place amongst the stormy decibel oceans produced by this band, rather, by this beast. In the music of Boris everything has meaning yet nothing is burdened with a name. The extensive, simple, repetitive and frequently noisy portraits that constitute “Feedbacker” are loaded with an enormous weight that nevertheless remains unaccompanied by any attempted measurement of value.
Rock’n’roll was the original liberation. The doors were kicked wide open; sex, drugs, critical thinking, politics, sex, drugs, spirituality, sex, music, music, music. Goddamn we were free! Boris is thus, redemption from whatever the hell that was. Boris offers liberation from liberation, the destruction of the astral plane, howling guitars, abrasive walls of noise that seem eternal, that swallow you whole, that open the real gates, the gates of the void, and finally let your mind rest and be silent and take everything, absolutely everything in, if only for one perfect, golden second. This is Boris, pure music, no attitude, no scene, and no ties to anything that could soil it; music completely disconnected from the world and yet utterly worldly. In other words ladies and gentlemen, it’s rock’n’roll.
