Boris - Präparat

[Zeus 7997]

Score:  | Oh, how much I've missed you Boris. Drone on.

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Boris has been around almost as long as I've been alive, and in that time this band has managed to churn out enough albums to drive even Bill Gates bankrupt if he were to buy them all on vinyl. Every album they've done always features that signature Boris charm, no matter how far they've strayed from their relentlessly heavy, Melvins-inspired brand of drone/doom. This time, they've gone the route of the fuzzy psychedelic drone freakout with Präparat, creating one unholy puree of madness which despite it being unlike anything I've heard in years, is still so Boris.

 

Describing Präparat in words is almost as hard as describing Boris in a paragraph. It's all over the place but nowhere at once. Boris leads you into a nice predictable place with a few tracks, but then has no problems destroying that illusion for a track or two to keep you on your toes. There are long stretches of time without lyrics - so long in fact you forget there are any. A psychedelic freakout drops into a feedback-laden seven minute drone which leads into a blues rock/thrash jam all in one go and the lack of consistency somehow itself is consistent. While this would cause much difficulty for any other band I can think of immediately, Boris pull it off without even breaking a sweat.

This is cause for much of my frustration with my review: no words exist in my vocabulary to describe exactly what this is. The best comparison that I can draw is that this is their second version of Vein - released to challenge all of their fans on what defines Boris. Präparat is a dare to sit down and try your best to get at their message, but it's not difficult just to be difficult. It genuinely is this monolithic.

[bonsaijodelfisch 328]

this album is, despite of its seemingly chaotic structures, a very melodic one with song-craftsmanship beyond all their previous releases, beatiful stuff there. i'll start with a trackbytrack

 

01 December:

classic dreamy boris stuff, hello there "my machine" loving it, great opener

∑/10

 

02 Elegy:

heavy stuff, but very melodical aswell, i like takeshis vocals in this one, which is rare

┼/10

 

03 Evil Stack

well, a noise-filler/transition, works fine, but doesn't need a score

 

04 Monologue

starts of as another dreampop/rock song and goes into epic monumental rock of sorts.

intentional or not, i would have preferred the leadguitar to be in tune very much

Δ/10

 

05 Method of Error

sperimental doom-noise-stuff with some stoner-sludge-blues in the later bits, need a bit more time to get into it (some issues here i'll adress later on...)

¶/10

 

06 Bataille Suere

Stomping supergroovy drop G# StonerDoom. this song will SLAY live!!!!

↕/↔

 

07 Perforated Line

see "Evil Stack" + awesome twist in the end

 

08 Castel In The Air

boris, i love it when you're creepy

€/10

 

09 Mirano

another actual "conventional" song on this album, and a beautiful at that, beatifully melodic at times and still undeniably boris all the way, takeshi could've tried a few more vocal-takes tho

this one will be great live too

√/10

 

10 Canvas

droooooooooooooooooooooone, nuffsaid

œ/10

 

11 Maeve

sperimental noise-collage-outro. works fine, no rating needed

 

BUT!

 

(tl;dr, sounds like shit)

 

and i'm terribly sorry to always be the douche that's nagging about production and mixing and stuff, but this is just terrible. i don't know what happened to boris, if they changed the mixer/producer or whatnot, they sounded so incredibly good a few years back.

hell "aileron" from heavy rocks 2011 is my personal blueprint of what psychedelic/stoner/doom/sludge/yourmum SHOULD sound like, attention please, original heavy rocks, pink and the likes were awesome too.

 

but ever since second edition "new album" came out its like a wet dog farting in your ears.

and i'm not talking about low-budget and DIY stuff or static-noise and the likes (although i'm pretty sure that noise could've been avoided aswell, but ok, that's part of the charme i guess)

 

there doesn't seem to be a single cymbal hit on the entire album that doesn't clip into the digital reds, which results in the sonic equivalent of stepping on a lego... with your ears!

 

all that treble-heavieness is most unpleasant with the vocals where every single drop of spit of takeshi is so incredibly annoying, beeing plastered all over your face and/or tatooed on your foreskin.

those can be wanted effects for noise-glitch-industrial and stuff, so to some amount of boris catalogue aswell, but there's really no point to it on a record like this.

 

also what is the point of heaving the arguably best and most monumental hoover-dam-like amplifiers and drumkits if you then record/mix it with what seems like a mixture of an iphone and a gameboy color (mastered on a toaster perhaps...)

 

with heavyrocks aileron you can listen to it on ridicculous levels, with the higher the volume, the higher the pleasure (dammit, i once booked the studio in the middle of the night just to do exactly that, probably three hours of nearly live-level heavy rocks satisfaction)

 

with everything from newalbum onwards even at moderate levels it just makes you want to pearce needles through your ears to make it hurt less.

please make the loud song comparison yourself, aileron vs. methodoferror...

 

i guess i'll once again, just like with cosmos, have to do my own personal "remaster" just to make it sort of tolerable, because i very much would want to listen to this frequently, but in it's current state this is just torture for me.

[Zeus 7997]

This may get a re-release in a few months since most Boris releases come out on vinyl first and then make their way to CD later. I don't know what should be attributed to the actual pressing and what should be attributed to how this was ripped, so I suppose we can't say if/unless we get another vinyl rip or CD release.

[Number Girl 48]

This may get a re-release in a few months since most Boris releases come out on vinyl first and then make their way to CD later. I don't know what should be attributed to the actual pressing and what should be attributed to how this was ripped, so I suppose we can't say if/unless we get another vinyl rip or CD release.

Would really love if it got a CD release. Vinyl makes me sad . . . I don't have the right kind of player for them yet. Glad to hear you enjoyed it.