Boredoms Albums (15)
'Super Roots, Vol. 5'
Release Date 1/8/2007
Tracks 1
Label Very Friendly
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
The fifth volume in the Boredoms' Super Roots series is the longest and easily the most extreme. Composed of a single, 64-minute track, it's the stuff pure noise fans will bleat over. Guitars, basses, drums, sonic rumblings from another world and distortion up the wazoo are what designate and distinguish "02 GO!!!!!" from anything else in the Japanese outfit's catalog. It's as extreme as Merzbow, and somehow seems to be both more and less musical simultaneously. In fact, the entire cut feels like the climax of a long jam that doesn't quite end. You get the picture: the guitarists and bassists are jumping up to signal the end, but it doesn't quite get there. This is the sound of jet engines perhaps in full flight. Dynamics shimmer and shift a bit, but they never resolve. It's bloody awesome. This is ambient music for the end of time. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
After a long silence -- their last album, Vision Creation Newsun, was issued in the U.S. in 2001 (although it came out in Japan in 1999) -- the Boredoms return with Seadrum/House of Sun, a monolithic two-track slab of cosmic rapture. Packaged in a minimal yet lavish sparkle blue jewel case with silver and gold printed artwork that will break the heart of any buyer unfortunate enough to damage it, the album feels like a release from Sun Ra with Fela as bandleader, and that's without even listening to it! On to the music: the first track is "Seadrum." It opens with a simple vocal that rises and falls like a tide. There's a brief intrusion of chimes and suddenly the vocal, which was beginning to sound like classic '60s Abbey Lincoln, is gone, replaced by African drumming heavy with echo and busy hands on the mixing board panning and filtering the percussion. A drum kit joins the building wall of hand drums, and not far behind is a cascading piano that sounds as if Liberace and Alice Coltrane are playing a game of four hands. The drums have now built into breakbeat shuffle full of the wide crashing electronic sweeps that gave the last few Boredoms discs their Krautrock-ish Amon Düül II edge. The vocals have returned, but are now layered with two or three lines spiraling slowly upward. The drums slowly fade to a whisper, taking a breath before the second half of "Seadrum" begins. A marimba and tabla are introduced but are soon absorbed into the wash of drums, vocals, and piano that continue to swell and fade throughout the remainder of the 23-minute track. Whew! Never have the usually mischievous Boredoms sounded this focused and, well, downright elegant really -- a masterful pairing of cosmic rock and spiritual jazz references. The second track is also long, but refrains from the ear beating of "Seadrum." Instead, "House of Sun" is an Eastern-themed meditation for strings featuring tanpuras, sitars, and guitar. It starts simply enough with a droning tanpura and guitar peeling off shades of Popol Vuh ecstasy, but soon builds into an army of droning strings and several guitars, each going in its own direction. This all builds into a thick velvety curtain of sound that is never pulled away to reveal a wizard, but instead fades with the stage lights. A perfect third panel in the triptych that opened with Super Ae and continued with Vision Creation Newsun. ~ Wade Kergan, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Appearing in America after an initial Japanese release, and with a revamped track listing and song titles to boot ("Bocabola" is called that here only because somebody somewhere was worried about what a certain soft drink company might think of the original title), Pop Tatari definitely holds the crown as being one of the strangest things to surface under a major label's auspices. Even the Butthole Surfers' major label debut that year looked straightforward in comparison. Starting off with "Noise Ramones," which consists solely of various high-pitched tones like those of the Emergency Broadcast System, Tatari contains some nearly conventional bits. Yet even the semi-lounge smoothness of "Nice B-O-R-E Guy Boyoyo Touch" collapses just enough, while elsewhere the screaming lunacy of fullthrottle Boremania rampages unchecked. Songs shudder to stops, launch into roaring mania and deathstomp rattle, and crunch more quickly and unexpectedly than those of just about anybody else -- no real change there, then! Add dashes of heavy funk mania ("Bo Go" would do early Funkadelic proud) along with whatever logic operates inside the band members' skulls, and the result is more cockeyed genius. Yamatsuka Eye rants above the whole mess like a man possessed, trading off with other band members in ways that practically redefine call and response. Singling out all the highlights would take forever, but "Bore Now Bore" feels like a mid-'60s frug played by berserk aliens, with some random electronics to boot, while a cover of the old Peggy Lee standard "Fever," retitled "Heeba," keeps the central riff but abandons just about everything else; the lyrics sound like they're slurred through cotton and various thrashy instrumental breaks. Concluding with the multigenre purée of "Cory & the Mandara Suicide Pyramid Action or Gas Satori," Tatari kicks out the jams eight different ways at once. ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
'Rebore, Vol. 0'
Release Date 8/7/2001
Tracks 7
Label Wea International
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What The Critics Say
Boredoms' ringleader Yamatsuka Eye has never been one to sit still for long, and given his immersion into DJ culture in the late '90s, it's not surprising that he should want to issue another version of his band's Vision Creation Newsun. Although some remix albums are pegged as inessential curios, Rebore, Vol. 0 is so different from its source album that it nearly achieves status as a legitimate follow-up release, rather than just a companion piece. Eye chooses to emphasize a futuristic, electronically enhanced aesthetic instead of Vision Creation Newsun's cathartic, psychedelic brawn. Sometimes the sound is reminiscent of Eye's DJ Pica Pica Pica project, wherein he compiles a hyper-speed DJ mix of world music, electro, obscure techno, and even classical music. Despite Eye's interest in techno, Rebore, Vol. 0 actually tends to shy away from outright "beats." Most of the songs (all titled incorporating the number "7") start with a guitar or synthesizer line, and build upon that. "77" takes guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto's minimal arpeggio from the "circle" track on Vision Creation Newsun and adds space-age synth pings, what sounds like a deft xylophone line, and later brings in Hira's bassline, mostly buried in the original version. The mood is similar, but the execution is completely different, lending an intricate, graceful ambience to the piece. Likewise, "77777" takes Yamamoto's gentle, fingerpicked guitar figure and adds the sound of drummer Yoshimi's newborn child, later even soft vocals from Yoshimi herself. Some songs barely sound as if the same band could have produced them. "777777" takes a laid-back acoustic guitar figure and adds a tropical, bossa nova drum machine beat and in turn transforms the piece into a punchy Stereolab backing track. Rebore, Vol. 0 is different enough from Vision Creation Newsun that fans will have reason to listen, but more than that, it sits comfortably alongside Boredoms' best albums as a unique artistic experience. ~ Dominique Leone, All Music Guide
'Rebore, Vol. 3'
Release Date 4/3/2001
Tracks 1
Label Wea International
See Album Tracklist and Review
'Vision Creation Newsun'
Release Date 1/30/2001
Tracks 9
Label Birdman
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What The Critics Say
Vision Creation Newsun finds Boredoms moving even further away from the random noise that marked their early output and settling into a loose, jam-oriented aesthetic. The first two tracks (no song titles here, only symbols) find Boredoms further investigating pounding tribal rock with propulsive drumming, energetic guitar work, and vocal chants. The overall feel bears some similarity to Super Ae, with tracks that draw from Krautrock and psychedelia, but Vision Creation Newsun adds a folk element, including softer instrumental textures like hand percussion, lengthy cymbal washes, and acoustic guitars. Some passages even flirt with new age, as they weave bird songs and the sound of falling water into the mix. These delicate touches aptly demonstrate the sonic range of Boredoms, but some of these meandering pieces can get tedious. Still, the highlights are many. Guitarist Yama-Motor is the star here, and most of Vision Creation Newsun's best moments come from his hypnotic style and deep bag of effects. He is equally at home with the Spacemen 3-style feedback shriek of the second track as he is with the minimalist acoustic work that dominates the latter half of the album. The dual percussion of Yoshimi and ATR is also powerful, but when songs break into long drum solos, Boredoms will lose their more punk-oriented fans. This is not the left-field triumph that Super Ae was, but it's a strong album nonetheless. ~ Mark Richardson, All Music Guide
'Rebore, Vol. 2'
Release Date 1/9/2001
Tracks 1
Label Wea International
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
For the second edition of the Boredoms' remix project, the kings of the Japanese underground enlisted acclaimed Japanese DJ Ken Ishii to reconfigure their organized chaos. The results are as action-packed as their noisy post-punk excursions on record, with an added electronica twist that makes the resulting chaos even more devilish and playful than the originals. This series was made available strictly as a Japanese import in 2000 and provided a much-needed bridge in the gap between their jump-cut rock period and the sprawling neo-hippie psychedelia the new millennium saw them adopt. ~ Skip Jansen, All Music Guide
'Rebore, Vol. 1'
Release Date 11/14/2000
Tracks 1
Label Wea International
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Released on Avant, run by Yamatsuka Eye's Naked City bandmate John Zorn, and recorded by him with help from Martin Bisi, Wow 2 surfaced around the same time that Pop Tatari made its initial Japanese bow on Warner Bros. Saying the first album is more experimental and uncommercial than the second is pushing it -- it's not like the Boredoms were going to release catchy pop ditties all of a sudden. Rather, Wow 2 is just another wiggy slice of what makes the Boredoms' sound such a great, unpredictable experience. If anything, this release is actually more straightforward than Pop Tatari. The overall sound of the album feels a bit hollow; there's a lot of echo at points, especially noticeable on the scraps of unaccompanied vocals. Still, it's presumably intentional, as is the feeling that everything was recorded in single takes without overdubbing. Eye is the predominant vocalist throughout, and compared to the near Bomb Squad levels of musical interplay on Soul Discharge, the songs here are blunter and much more direct, with crunching lead riffs quite obvious at points. Various flute and sax noises crop up in the usual tumult of sound; whether it's Zorn having fun is left unclear in the liner notes, but it's equally likely that the Boredoms simply tackle wind instruments the same way they do electric: with gusto. "Pop Can" deserves mention for its remarkably restrained feel, with an ominous call-and-response feel to it; even when things start freaking out a bit, the plodding drum/bass combination keeps grinding along while the guitar plays a few high notes rather than launching into more slabs of feedback. The spacy guitar on "Rydeen!!" also sounds great -- a nice indication of the semi-prog sense that creeps further into their music on later releases. ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Surfacing again with an American release after a couple years of absence, the Boredoms showed themselves to still be truly a unique proposition with Super Ae. Taking some more of the prog/Kraut influences that crept into earlier efforts while still firing up the amps all around, Eye and his cohorts (forming a core quintet this time around) once again become the most out-there band in the world. "Super You" is a simply fantastic way to start, with initial whizzing stereo-to-stereo sounds leading into a wonderful collection of slow, ponderous death rock riffs that sound like all the Black Sabbath and Metallica wannabes of the world gathered to create one massive opening fanfare via guitars. Logically the Boredoms spike the punch by interrupting things with sped-up tape sounds and pitch changes, making the proceedings all the more fun. From there, Super Ae continues along to something close to a concept album; each track feels like a perfect lead in to the rest, while the whole sense is of one long, mantra-like piece, faster or slower as the band feels like it. The big change is that the volume is not so much used to stun as it is to maintain a general atmosphere while the rhythm section cranks along in semi-motorik style, a bit like Can with some even freer spirits at play. Not everything is total destruction in the Boredoms scheme of things, admittedly -- "Super Coming" has some hilarious cartoony vocals from all participants. "Super Are" begins with a serene keyboard performance and chanting background vocals before turning into a psych/acid folk drum/singing jam session á la Amon Düül or fellow countrymen Ghost. Needless to say, though, the amps and monster sludge kick in soon enough, and quite well at that! "Super Good," the album closer, also has a nicely calm way about it. ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
