Heavyweight Japanese trio Boris returns to San Francisco's Fillmore
Delivering its unique brand of heavy music for more than three decades, experimental Japanese trio Boris brings its current "Amplifier Worship Tour" to the Fillmore in San Francisco Sunday.
Formed in 1992 when guitarist Wata, bassist/guitarist Takeshi Ohtani, original drummer Nagata and singer Atsuo Mizono came together while attending art school in Tokyo -- Atsuo would begin playing drums when Nagata left in 1996 -- Boris has traveled a wildly varied path from their roots as drone/doom merchants. Early efforts Absolute Ego and Amplifier Worship showed a deep debt to Bullhead-era Melvins (they took their name from one of the songs on that album). Their 2000 album Flood took the sound to a new level, exploring feedback, distortion and volume over the course of an epic 70-minute song.
Boris has ventured further afield since those efforts. The band's 2005 breakout effort Pink introduced elements of shoegaze and dream pop into the stoner sludge template, while the following year's Rainbow explored more pastoral psych with guest guitarist Michio Kurihara, who had come to fame as a member of the acclaimed Japanese band Ghost. The band's profile would rise higher after touring with Nine Inch Nails in 2008 and appearing on the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch movie The Limits of Control. The band would also produce collaborative albums working with Japanese noise act Merzbow, fellow experimental drone band Sunn O))) and lead singer to the Cult Ian Astbury
The ever-prolific Boris ramped up it's productivity to new heights in 2011, releasing three separate discs -- New Album, Heavy Rocks and Attention Please -- that veered from J-pop to electronic dance music to glam rock. While the trio would scale back its releases, Boris has continued to tour regularly, in some cases playing it's classic recordings Flood and Pink in their entirety.
In 2017, the band released its 24th album Dear (so titled as a thank you to longtime fans) which found the trio edging back into the tuneful, monolithic riffs that marked Pink. The band would embark on an extensive 25th anniversary tour that year, playing in San Francisco twice while appearing at the 2017 edition of the annual metal/doom/psych fest Psycho Las Vegas. While the band was considering retiring while recording the songs for Dear, a burst of creativity produced far more new tunes than could be contained on the album, encouraging Boris to continue making music.
In 2019, the trio released the conceptual double LP LφVE & EVφL that mixed the band's drone metal and ambient dreampop sides on Jack White's Third Man Records, which also reissued the classic early 2000s Boris albums Feedbacker and Akuma No Uta. The group went into isolation when it was forced off the road by the COVID-19 pandemic, but continued its relentlessly prolific ways. Boris put out arguably its most hardcore punk effort ever with NO, followed by several split and collaborative recordings (including 2R0I2P0 with Merzbow on Sacred Bones), a host of digital-only archival live and studio albums and W, the atmospheric companion piece to NO. The band issued its second album of 2022 with Heavy Rocks 2022 for Relapse Records, Boris' third recording with that title delivers another blistering salvo of punk-informed mayhem tempered with their trademark experimentalism. In December of that year, the group put out Fade, another instrumental exploration of drone and distortion.
The trio has maintained its relentless output of new albums since then, releasing the pandemic studio collaboration with the band Uniform entitled Bright New Disease last year along with a deluxe reissue of the 2002 version of Heavy Rocks as well as wider releases for other Japan-only albums with Merzbow and a new split album with Japanese alt-rock band Coaltar of the Deepers -- "hellothere" -- that came out earlier this year.
Boris brings its current "Amplifier Worship Service" tour to the Fillmore in San Francisco Sunday, headlining the venue after an opening set from LA-based band Starcrawler. First emerging from the Los Angeles underground in 2015, the group is fronted by towering, theatrical vocalist Arrow de Wilde. While their first two albums and live shows often drew comparisons to the unhinged punk rock abandon of Iggy and the Stooges, the band toned down the aggressiveness and added a greater focus on melody with their third album She Said.
Boris with Starcrawler
Sunday, Sept. 29, 8 p.m. $41.25
The Fillmore
