Boris :" W"

 

Japanese curators of weird are now delving deeper into the sonics of a shoe gaze like wonderland of sound. Wata handles all of the vocals on this release. She barely rises above a meager whisper on the first song. This one is heavier on the drone than the metal. They have been a little bit everywhere over the course of their career, so this does not surprise me and fits well with who they are. Things get even more atmospheric on the second song, and she sounds like a memory of a schoolgirl who got lost in the woods on acid. You can hear her as she passes between dimensions, though I am not sure if this is really singing. It feels like this piece is more about the sounds than actually writing a song.  Eventually it does drift into something more melodic, but that is after 4 minutes of floating around. 

"Drowning By Numbers" finds them dialing up the weird. There is distortion but this is perhaps less abrasive than some of the ambiance some of the other numbers on this album are drowned in. Four songs in and still do not know if she can thing. There is a lot of chanted whispered. This is like shoe gaze ASMR. She wants "the Fallen" to be more of a song, but the rest of the band was not at the practice where this was decided. Midway they do go into the song and kind of rock out though it is very discordant like a marching band on acid at a Tom Waits concert. "Beyond Good and Evil" they make even less of an effort to write a song. In the last 30 seconds they do play some metal, but we needed that energy four minutes ago. 

I might appreciate their artsy cult status, but that does not mean they get a pass when it comes to writing songs, as I have already heard them do much better than this. Some of this swathing ambiance is still pretty listenable but is that the bar they deserve to set for themselves. "Old Projector" is a song that had potential but could use some of the sonic fat being trimmed. "You Will Know" is all sonic fat but it is also pretty music just a guitar interlude. The last song fidns them getting heavier but is also draped in a great deal of noise. It takes almost two minutes for them to get into some kind of song, rather than a sound. It ends up not really going anywhere. Which is a fitting metaphor for this album as a whole, I will round it down to a 6.5. This is being released January 21st on Sacred Bones .