Tracks
Boris & Michio Kurihara: "Starship Narrator"
(2007)
By Lawrence Lui | 29 January 2008
Fresh from exorcising ambient demons with Sunn0))) on last year's Altar, the ever-prolific Boris return to face-rocking glory in this no-nonsense collaboration with Japanese psych legend Michio Kurihara. Wielding an ax loud and serrated enough to chop down vast swathes of Siberian forestry, Kurihara has Ghost and White Heaven writ large on his resume, and he's clearly the star here, allowed to blissfully show-stop as Boris power-trios earnestly behind him.
"Starship Narrator," from their newest release Rainbow, is at once excessive and compact, packing an epic-sized wallop in a reasonably brisk four minutes. Anchored by a cycling riff and drummer Atsuo's skyward-in-triumph vocals, the song is an exercise in precisely controlled chaos, shuffling space and dynamics into a tightly-coiled electric boogie. Centerpieced by Kurihara's feedback-wrangling guitar solo, the track has the primordial hair-throwing drama you'd expect from this confederacy of highly-evolved knuckle-draggers. The solo by itself is worth the price of admission; leaping from the speakers like a perambulating dragon on a superfuzz big muff jag, it obliterates everything in its path, raising the noise floor to the stratosphere. Calling to mind Hendrix's skyscraping "Peace In Mississippi" or the overdriven buzzsaw textures of '60s garage icon Davie Allen, Kurihara's six string hoodoo makes a case for the instrument's enduring power to aurally astound, even in our jaded age of ubiquitous digital manipulation.
"Starship Narrator," from their newest release Rainbow, is at once excessive and compact, packing an epic-sized wallop in a reasonably brisk four minutes. Anchored by a cycling riff and drummer Atsuo's skyward-in-triumph vocals, the song is an exercise in precisely controlled chaos, shuffling space and dynamics into a tightly-coiled electric boogie. Centerpieced by Kurihara's feedback-wrangling guitar solo, the track has the primordial hair-throwing drama you'd expect from this confederacy of highly-evolved knuckle-draggers. The solo by itself is worth the price of admission; leaping from the speakers like a perambulating dragon on a superfuzz big muff jag, it obliterates everything in its path, raising the noise floor to the stratosphere. Calling to mind Hendrix's skyscraping "Peace In Mississippi" or the overdriven buzzsaw textures of '60s garage icon Davie Allen, Kurihara's six string hoodoo makes a case for the instrument's enduring power to aurally astound, even in our jaded age of ubiquitous digital manipulation.