Review of the Week

(Warner Music Japan)

After no original records since Vision Creation Newsun in 1999—their most recent, Vision Recreation Newsound in 2001 was a remix album—the immortal-as-they-are-esoteric Boredoms have recently released a new album, Seadrum/House of Sun. Almost 20 years after they began patching together their unique mishmash of experimental noise, the Boredoms are still going strong, releasing more than 15 albums, leaving countless side projects in their wake and recently touring as “the V8rdoms,” consistently putting on immensely long and sprawling psychedelic trance-noise-rock performances. This V8rdoms-esque record, though officially released with the moniker Boredoms, features their godfather, Eye Yamatsuka (a.k.a. Eye Yamantaka, or just eYe, best known for his legendarily abrasive/invasive noise band Hanatarash, translated, “the snot-nosed”), drummer and singer Yoshimi Yokota (a.k.a. Yoshimi P-We, the screeching, screaming Yoshimi featured on the Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 2”), and two additional drummers, ATR and E-Da.

This release keeps the tribal drumming of the V8rdom material while stripping away the phased guitars and almost-trancey/synthesizer sounds that have characterized their recent live shows—back to basics, the album consists almost entirely of actual acoustic instruments, without samples or synths. “Seadrum,” a 23:03 masterpiece, begins sounding like nothing else in the entirety of the Boredom’s formidable oeuvre of music—the first minute or so of the song consists of Yoshimi’s lone voice beautifully singing a wordless jazz riff. Her sustained final note fades into a rising tide of chimes and deep tribal drums that steadily pound away as metallic and organic percussive noise sounds throb in the background and spiral back and forth between the stereo channels. It seems strange to describe a 23 minute experimental-acoustic track as “sparse” and “restrained,” but both of these adjectives are apt to describe this, given the context of the recent V8rdom material and especially eYe’s Visian Recreation Newsound remixes. The drums continue to build in the track, until 4:33, when a piano(!) enters into the fray, weaving improvisational lines in with Yoshimi’s continued vocal flourishes, still wordless, merely a beautiful crooning melody—this band has clearly come a long way since the guttural growling of their 1986 Anal by Anal 7”. The song begins to build towards its first peak precisely at the song’s halfway point, where all the instruments and background sounds begin to drop away, culminating in a brief standstill, which immediately starts back up again with a calmer and more straightforwardly-jazzy piano and vocal improvisation. The insane wall of percussion resumes again, and the track winds down with a xylophone section and piano duel, finally ending with two strikingly graceful minutes of the two pianos, chimes, and vocal accompaniment.

To simply label the second track on the album, the 20:03 “House of Sun,” as “sort of boring” would not entirely be doing it justice, despite the fact that in truth, it is sort of boring. A more apt description would be that it is clearly meant for idiosyncratic listening: the swelling and intertwining sitars, guitars, flutes, and blend of obscure and traditional string instruments, flowing together with seemingly little to no percussion dividing it up (let alone any trace of the pervasive drum torrents of the previous track) and no clear song structure at all, strikes the listener as specifically designed for one in a meditative or transcendent state, or someone who has recently consumed copious amounts of psychotropic substances that would allow them to get to the bottom of what exactly the Boredoms are trying to say with this song. I guess the traditional adage is appropriate here, that “you can’t expect transparency from a band whose last album consisted entirely of songs whose track names were pictographs.”

And yet after listening to Seadrum for the fifth time in a row, you start to realize why people spend upwards of $50 on a single Boredoms 7” on eBay.

—Jim Fingal