Boris - Attention Please
Boris are a Japanese group, not one person or any relation to the mayor of London. I became aware of them at the start of the year through their presence alongside Radiohead and The xx on the soundtrack to Confessions, my favourite film of 2011. There are several overhead and slow motion shots in the film which would not have had anything like the same power if not scored by Boris' brooding post rock.
This discovery was just in time for a year in which Boris released three albums, none of which sounded anything like that! Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but Attention Please certainly was very much new territory for them - guitarist Wata (I presume that's her on the cover) taking lead vocals for the album and the band making an attempt at a 'pop' record.
Certainly they remain a long way away from AKB48 or Perfume style J-Pop, but on the two singles "Hope" and "Spoon" they hit upon an exhilarating blend. Those songs sound like shoegaze played without the same slurred thickness but with the same sense of overwhelming sweetness masking a harshness beneath. "Hope" makes that harshness particularly clear when it suddenly breaks into a vicious guitar solo near the end before the sweetness takes back over even stronger. "Spoon" does wind tunnel noise and double drumming over the top of what passes for a chorus. The sense that Boris are making it up as they go along and don't really understand the genre they're playing just adds to the exhilaration.
The rest of the album is not on the same level and offers a more uneasy compromise between their noise past and pop wishes, but has plenty of other compelling moments, from the stripped back breathy pleading of "Attention Please" to the malfunctioning machinery rhythms of "Tokyo Wonder Land", to the calm of their best Sigur Rós impression on "Hand in Hand"
Now for the spoiler - this is not the last Boris album in this list, and things are going to get both better and weirder from here.
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