Boredoms
Vision Creation Newsun

THE REVIEW

The Boredoms are one of Japan's most chameleonic entities. Led by the eccentric Yamatsuka Eye (a collaborator with Zorn's Naked City, which says a lot), this band has had an extraordinarily unique musical journey, starting with their bizarre and violent debut albums, then the explosion of Pop Tatari, leading to the maturity achieved with Super æ and this Vision Creation Newsun.

The sonic journey of this album moves on purely experimental and psychedelic coordinates. From the start, calm, almost tranquil, it then bursts into the roar of the cymbals of the drums? Yes, plural, because the rhythmic section used by the band is quite extensive and includes a variety of tribal percussion instruments, even using two drum kits simultaneously.

However, it's not just noise contained in Vision Creation Newsun, or at least not entirely: this album presents itself primarily as a journey, a kind of voyage, although rich with delirious and dreamlike connotations. A journey that is entirely a rebellion against rock, and is thus a desecrating and dadaist act, in its search for a new language: a pure act of creation and an effective demolition of the rock skeleton, yet using the same instruments, though greatly expanded by the electronic apparatus.

The sound thus is a mutant maneuvering and moving between noise coordinates, affected by electronic elements that also form the basis of the band's more psychedelic and near-space-rock moments, with its wavering and "liquid" sounds. However, what might be a constant apparent movement around the same point—an evident risk of any album based on dreamy and, to use a fashionable term, "trippy" atmospheres—becomes in fact a journey thanks, especially, to the band's rhythmic structure, fully supported by drums and percussion, a structure that rejects the pop repetition of verse and chorus, preferring a walking, continuous, frantic, almost dance-like movement (just listen to the central section of Star), a rhythmic structure that thus goes beyond the song itself, presenting an effective continuity throughout the album.

This album deserves more than one listen, as it presents a courageous gateway to what could be a new dimension of rock, perhaps simple and childish, primordial (in this regard, the song titles are not words: they are symbols—a tendency toward almost childish simplicity that is decidedly dadaist) yet already developed and contextualized within that rock, perhaps an uncomfortable progenitor for our Boredoms, but certainly fascinating.