Review Summary: A true monument to filth and perhaps my favourite drone doom album. Let me tell ya, it hurts.
Boris are a band with a massive catalogue of albums sporadically shifting genres, so nowadays their first album almost seems left behind in the hustle and bustle of all their inferior garage rock, noise and minimalist ambient releases. They began in the 90s as some of the most filthy, harsh, unrefined, repulsive drone doom imaginable, giving their proper respects to the genre's forerunners Earth and Melvins (the name of the band being the title of a Melvins song). While investigating the pioneers of drone doom and the mighty Sunn O))) I completely overlooked this masterpiece, which contains absolutely everything I ever thought was missing from Earth and Sunn O)))'s work, and which is more extreme, abrasive and balls-out than the few drone-like songs Melvins contributed to the early existence of the genre (no disrespect to the aforementioned bands, but this album really is in a league of its own). Honestly, this was a shocking and delightful surprise.
The album consists of only one song, over an hour in length (so all the wimpy anti-doom ADHD kids can step outside right now). It begins with some mega heavy distorted bass and huge amounts of feedback ringing out. The production here is much more harsh, abrasive and mucky than anything else I've heard in this style of music, which was the first thing I dug about it. As a sluggish, filthy, crushing bass riff crawls along some percussive elements enter the music letting us know a drummer will be present on this recording (something I wish Sunn O))) and Earth had considered to enhance the heaviness of their sound. I mean really, drum machine does drone doom no justice, unless it's you've got a less serious approach like Thrones). Also early on we get a small amount of harsh screaming and yelling, which gives another hint that this will be a monolithic exercize in doom excellence. About 20 minutes in the drums start to bash into a beat, and the recording on them is just pure primitive filth. At this point I've got a boner, let me tell you, as this album just reached levels of filth and heaviness I had only before dreamed of. Around the 25 minute mark the vocals enter the picture. Oh buddy. The vocals are violent and harsh as ***, falling somewhere between higher Grief-style screams and more stoner doom-esque clean yells, and in the muckiness of the production they just sound like someone puking and retching behind obscenely crushing riffs. With the full band playing they get into some Melvins-like and stonerish stuff, but this can only be heard discretely in the riffs as they're altogether too mammoth and minimal to be categorized as anything but drone doom. After being anally raped, beaten and pissed on, the heavy droning continues but the drums and vocals fade away. This continues on and on until nothing but sections of delayed looping feedback are left ringing out for a while. The repetitiveness here works into a hypnotic trance (I bet potheads sure love this album), although it's still pretty damn grating and abrasive. And that's all for this album.
Boris have had quite a few questionable releases over their career, but boy did they nail the drone doom sound that originally inspired them. The whole middle section of this album to me defines what the drone doom genre should aspire to and pushes this album from pretty cool to ***ing masterpiece. That's not to say that you should just skip ahead to the meat of the delicious drone sandwich, as the whole beginning section works excellently as a prelude and the end section as an epilogue. One minor qualm I have is that the grating feedback loop at the end goes on for just a little too long. Playing this album on full blast is quite an experience for the doom fan and most especially the drone doom wacko. It highly surpassed my expectations to the extent that I'm slightly leaning toward saying this could top Earth 2 or OO Void. As blasphemous as that may be to fellow droners, this album is just so damn filthy, grimy, disgusting and stupefyingly heavy. Lord help me...
