Boredoms

One of the most adventurous bands on the planet, Osaka, Japan's Boredoms are rarely easy to take, but -- especially on their later records -- they're also sublime and monumentally powerful. Led by the indefatigable Eye Yamatsuka (later Yamantaka Eye, or simply EYE), they smash every preconception of what rock music is supposed to be like into splinters, and then build a palace out of them.

Boredoms' first album, Osorezan to Stooges Kyo ("The Stooges Craze and Osorezan"), was subsequently compiled with the earlier Anal by Anal EP as Onanie Bomb Vs. the Sex Pistols. It's a total mess -- they've clearly decided that they want to destroy everything predictable about music, but haven't a clue what to replace it with. There's a lot of vehement shrieking in a made-up language, riffs that self-destruct after a few seconds, and incoherent clattery mayhem. Soul Discharge is a real improvement. It's still hilariously berserk, but the epileptic rhythms are purposeful more than accidental, and they're actually sort of engaging with pop, albeit from somewhere outside our solar system -- check out the B-52's disembowelment "52 Boredom" and the punk-metal freakout "Sun, Gun, Run."

With Pop Tatari, Boredoms had a decent recording budget for the first time, and used it to make their most agitated and discombobulated record yet. It starts with 30 seconds of a piercing sine wave (called "Noise Ramones"), and thereafter whirls into an hour-long schizophrenic frenzy -- Eye's voice sounds like an entire zoo fighting to the death. Wow2 is Boredoms live in the studio and attempting to pass for a heavy rock band, which is sort of like Frankenstein's monster attempting to pass for a professional wrestler. Around this time, Boredoms made their first real splash in America, opening the Lollapalooza tours of 1994 and 1995 with their legendary live show, as much acrobatic theater of the absurd as rock performance. Beneath the howling anarchy of tracks such as the Bore anthem "Shock City," though, Chocolate Synthesizer is a genuine work of compositional art, featuring melodic motifs that recur through the album, battered into every conceivable shape, as well as the band's newfound willingness to stay in their fabulously twisted grooves.

Having pushed chaos to the limit, they started to get serious about building a set of tools for their music with a series of EPs and albums called Super Roots -- experimental records, which by this band's standards is saying something. The first Super Roots EP is an attempt to record something quiet (or, as Eye put it, "ambient hardcore"); they were still constitutionally incapable of not bashing things and squealing, but it's fun to hear them try to restrain themselves, and "Budokan Tape Try (500 Tapes High)" even sort of paraphrases Grace Jones' version of "Demolition Man." Super Roots 2 is an ultra-limited single that includes lots of silence; Super Roots 3 is the entire band hammering at a one-chord riff for half an hour; there is no Super Roots 4, since 4 signifies in Japanese roughly what 13 does in English; Super Roots 5 is an hour-long noise cloud; 6 is a series of scraggly but intense exercises in rhythm and timbre.

And then they proved what all that research had been for. Super ae is a pounding, astounding psychedelic masterwork, the raw power of Boredoms' early records harnessed and directed into sustained riff-laden sun worship. Its centerpiece, "Super Going," rises and breaks and rises again with tidal majesty; elsewhere, its drones and chants blow up to monomaniacal electric force and fall again to heart-stopping acoustic splendor. It's beautiful, which they'd never been before, and it sounds like a new kind of hymn.

Two more Super Roots discs followed Super ae: 7 is a very long, delightful band-plus-electronics jam on the riff from the Mekons'"Where Were You?" and 8 is just a single, a frenetic jungle-influenced cover of an old Japanese cartoon theme. Vision Creation Newsun is the real sequel to Super ae, and at times even more intense -- there are shades of drum and bass in its pattering rhythms -- although it recycles a few of the same themes and structures. Suncidal Cendencies is an album-length "EP" with two variations on one of Vision's tracks, plus a 24-minute, five-percussionist workout credited to "Uoredoms."

The Rebore discs are extended megamixes of the Boredoms catalogue (leaning most heavily on Super ae and Vision); vols. 1, 2, and 3 are respectively remixed by U.N.K.L.E., Ken Ishii, and DJ Krush, and don't alter the source material much beyond throwing in the occasional breakbeat. Eye himself takes over for Vol. 0, and unsurprisingly does odder things. The members of Boredoms are also staggeringly prolific outside the band, with more than 50 recorded side projects -- the records Eye has made with turntablist Otomo Yoshihide as MC Hellshit & DJ Carhouse are particularly insane, and he's collaborated memorably with Sonic Youth and with John Zorn's Naked City project. Eye's cover artwork for the Shock City Shockers compilation of Bore pals was subsequently appropriated as the back cover of Beck's Midnite Vultures. (DOUGLAS WOLK)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide