Boris is a band I’ve been into for the better half of last decade and now into this one. The band keeps my attention by not sticking to one style.

Their music is largely rock-based, going between drone metal, psychedelic rock, and noise rock. But they also have a pop album.

They frequently collaborate with other musicians. Sun Baked Snow Cave with Merzbow is probably my favorite experimental track of all time. It plays for 62 minutes, and is the ultimate approach to that style of music. The build up and the intensity work. It truly wowed me. They also have collaborations with classics like Keiji Haino and Sunn O))).

May 2011 saw three full-length albums released by Boris. One of them was New Album, which I’ll discuss in this post. Boris is such an eclectic band, it doesn’t feel right to discuss all three of these distinctly different albums in one post.

With New Album, Boris reminds me of my favorite Japanese band, Coaltar of the Deepers. Not to limit Boris, or the shoegaze genre, but much of it sounds far too similar. Perhaps New Album was an experiment to see how well they could make a shoegaze album, but still keep that unique Boris sound. Either way, New Album is still excellent.

Luna takes me over completely. It has that progression you’re used to with a post-rock band, but that encapsulating feeling you get from a shoegaze song. Sometimes this can be hard to pull off, as the genre attempts to be as heavy as possible but also as chill as possible.

No other track on the album does as good of a job of this as Luna.

Most of the songs on the album are similar to Luna, except Jackson Head and the song following it, Les Paul Custom ’86. Those two songs are far too dance-oriented to be considered shoegaze. They might be considered dance punk, if anything. They make for a good diversion from the rest of the album.

If you like rock music, and you want to hear something different, definitely check out Boris, either New Album or one of the other two albums from May 2011. The three albums are so vastly different, and I’ll continue discussing them next week, so be sure to read my next post! You’ll be glad you did.