It was 2006 and emo was beginning to loosen its grip on America’s youth. Bands like The Shins, Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie were playing indie rock to pop-sized audiences. Bloghouse was inching toward its peak as America’s dance party soundtrack of choice, and somewhere in there was a hole slowly filling with bands like Sunn O))), Earth and veteran Japanese sludge-core trio Boris — thanks namely to their 2005 breakthrough album Pink — leading to a phenomenon dubbed “hipster metal.” This year, Boris commemorates the record’s 10th anniversary with a deluxe reissue and accompanying album-performed-in-its-entirety tour that lands in Third Man Records’ Blue Room Monday night.
In and of itself, the term “hipster metal” is a tad oxymoronic. As the weapon of choice for outsiders the world over, metal has always been an inclusionary and accepting force that turns no one away for lack of coolness. But back in the mid-Aughts, unmanaged beards, black leather, spikes and molten guitars were still a little much for the PBR crowd to consume en masse. While there’s no doubt a better term for it, “hipster metal” would serve as a gateway drug for casual listeners outside metal’s tightly knit worldwide-cult community, listeners eager for something a little more dangerous and intense than affable alternatives like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Arcade Fire.
By the end of the band’s first decade, Boris had already dabbled in a handful of metal sub-genres like drone, sludge, doom, ambient metal and extreme noise, while pledging loyalty to none of them. But with Pink, they compressed the extent of their fringe explorations and created something sonically massive and extremely listenable all at once. The album meshed sprawling shoegaze, blown-out garage rock, deafening doom and old-school stoner psychedelia into a seamless mixtape of heavy jams. In an era defined by file-sharing and iTunes — when music fans’ genre loyalty was no longer bound by financial burden — it might have been the first time such a pastiche made sense, acting as a sort of Trojan horse that trotted heavy music into the hearts and minds of indie-rock fans.
The album opens with the seven-and-a-half-minute “Farewell” — a track that both floats and crushes, with layers of glimmering feedback and sparkling guitar bliss — and soon stomps the gas pedal into a high-octane, raw and furious punk-metal blowout on cuts like “Woman on the Screen” and “Nothing Special,” before downshifting into the patiently ominous sludge of “Blackout.” At this point, the album is only halfway finished. The band breaks things up with the blistering power-blues boogie of “Electric,” which sounds like Motörhead slow-riding on a Foghat-fueled adrenaline rush. The rest of the album keeps up subtle shifts in full-throttle, fuzzed-out stoner riffs, save for the soft, sparkling drone of “My Machine,” which is a graceful respite before 10-minute closer “Just Abandoned Myself.” That one, midway through, slowly breaks apart and fizzles out into washes of cascading guitar feedback and pulsing fuzz bass.
But that’s the end of the record only if you’re not listening to the deluxe edition, which features nine previously unreleased tracks. With most reissues, extra tracks typically mean some half-baked demos, live recordings and other throwaway odds and ends, but in the case of Pink’s “Forbidden Songs” disc, the result is basically an entire second album that’s almost as good as the original, featuring even more stylistic twists and turns. “Your Name Part 2” sounds like Pink Floyd playing with a bomb strapped to its back, stepping ever-so-carefully before exploding anyway. “Sofun” is a catchy crossover-thrash banger. The band traipses gracefully into the jazzy grunge-pop ballad “Room Noise,” before shifting into the sexy psychedelic strut of “N.F. Sorrow.” Penultimate track “Are You Ready?” is the catchiest gem in the whole mess.
Hipster metal’s wake created an expanding audience for bands for like Deafheaven, Pallbearer, Baroness, Torche, Pelican and Wolves in the Throne Room — bands who’d garner substantial followings outside the metal community with a crossover crowd of multicolor-clad non-heshers. Boris, meanwhile, has continued doing Boris, forging ahead with restless, genre-curious experimentation and expanding into all manner of heavy styles (and even elements of J-pop) over the course of a dozen-plus releases post-Pink, in addition to collaborations with Ian Astbury of The Cult, Japanese experimental composers Merzbow and Keiji Haino and fellow drone enthusiasts Sunn O))). While none of it has quite caught the bottled-lightning aura of Pink, it isn’t because they’ve started doing anything differently. Boris seems intent on always throwing a variety of shit at the wall, whether or not any of it sticks.Â
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