Last week when I saw Boris I wrote that “the same adventurousness that make Boris so refreshingly unpredictable also means that appreciating their music can require a weird level of awareness and irony.” This song, from their pop experiment New Album, is the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s instantly catchy and really well-executed, but the polished, mall-ready production aesthetic gives me an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Am I only letting myself enjoy it because I’m insulated by Boris’s decades of avant credibility?
Stephen O’Malley seems to have felt something similar — but also points toward a way out. In an interview with the Quietus he says
I love watching Boris go through all these chameleon stages. It’s pretty interesting, even if I don’t connect with all those stages. I appreciate it as a long-term conceptual work.
I’m used to thinking of bands aiming to embody a focused aesthetic — O’Malley’s own Sunn O))) are a particularly purposive example — and so I’d thought of Boris’s shifting styles as deviations from their larger goals. But thinking of the shifts as being the essence of the project weirdly improves Boris for me. Since Boris’s style encompasses all styles, you can enjoy their music without reference — so instead of “Flare“‘s high gloss representing a betrayal of some underlying aesthetic, it just becomes another effect, as worthy of formal interest as any other. It’s not about irony but about always-open, enthusiastic listening.
