http://densityofsound.wordpress.com/...boss-reviewed/
Starts with screeching then does that lovely lazy dischordant not quite singing half talking too cool but a bit paranoid but forgetting it all just now spacious groove thing that yer main men Sonic Yoot are so good at. Lee Ranaldo is on the desk and playing various things so I’m allowed that reference point so drop it yeah?. Is the first track going anywhere? I don’t care - it’s nice. All records should sound like this. Two chords good. Three chords bad. Ha punk… You got nothin’ on me with my crazy ways. It’s making me think of trainyards and kitchens and god. All at once.
God is a woman and she’s shouting and there’s banging and the guitar strings are stretching and they might break but they don’t, at least not yet. Albums should sound this live as a rule - it’s shouldn’t be a suprise to think ‘hey! it sounds like they are really playing their instruments and stuff’ apparantly it was recorded in a canyon. Therefore I think the Kaiser Chiefs should record their next album in a sewer.
Now we got hazy detuned guitar, like them crazy reggae men do but totally different. Seriously, it’s a detuned grunge dub guitar line with big looping drum fills and more streams of conciousness. This song is one big long bus ride and stuff keeps popping into view out window and everything is a little distant. I think it’s about god again cos she’s on about gardens and kingdoms but to be honest the words are shrill and musical and it all feels suitably brooding, so we won’t hold that against them. Actually it’s a little overblown here and there, but when you’re in a canyon who can blame you?
Empty Bottles suddenly turns the table and we’re into ballad mode, though on first listen it’s pretty forgetable though I temper this by saying it may be one of those songs that hits you…whallop and leaves you crying when you least expect it, like when you realise you have run out of screenwash for your car or something else totally stupid and it causes the whole of your life to collapse inwards like a big useless old cooling tower from an old powerstation. This track could be your saviour in this moment. For now though, bring back the guitars and that space…
Ooh! Empty highways - there we are! That’s a great reference point to start off Taste, which is all Polly Harvey, cocksure and leathery (the black sexy type, not the sun damaged dangly neck skin sort.) There is bass in strange triangle shapes and buzzy lovely rich sandpaper guitar, and I get it! That bass - it sounds like pylons stretching forever, impasive in the face of the heat, desert heat, sexual heat, this is, like 50 million times sexier than a diet coke advert.
Four/The Ballad of Harry Angstrom again has the cool two chord thing going on, with piano providing the rhythm this time and isn’t a ballad in any way I recognise - that is to say, isn’t fuckin’ awful*. It’s a white out of voices samples and feels like someone putting the record straight about something. With red paint, in an alarming metal room.
What else have we here? A big sprawl of noise from the future. It sounds like what swamps of dying robots sound like. An earie early morning song, all minor key and tired sad eyes. Finally we close with an industrial workout, a muscular automaton on a non stop ghost train ride. It’s called Circle.
The album is called Boss - it’s a cracker, it’s not as intensely manic as you’d expect, you can here that hint of Sonic Youth, but there is so much more here, it’s highly intriguing and eclectic and apparantly it’s about gorrilas or something, so say the sleeve notes. You can probably tell I ignored them.