Boris, "Dronevil -Final-"

The eagerly awaited CD release of Dronevil doesn’t disappoint. Taking a leaf from The Flaming Lips and Neurosis’s respective books, this album is on two discs to be played simultaneously. Boris have done this trick immense justice: in the past multiple disc albums have been gimmicky but not so much here. One disc explores drones and the other sticks with Boris’s more straightforward guitar, bass and drum playing.

 

Inoxia

There is an 20 twenty minutes of music not found on the original LPs (40 if you’re playing the discs separately). The new piece, “Loose”/”Red,” opens the album. The piece is a slow burner, it takes nearly quarter of an hour for it to get going properly. On Disc Drone “Loose” is a shimmering drone that is mainly high pitched feedback and cymbals. “Red” on Disc Evil fills out the lower end of the sound with the band playing in a style similar to that found on Earth’s Hex album of last year. Combined it makes a powerful piece, separately they both lose their impact.

The next piece, “Giddiness Throne”/”Evil Wave Form,” doesn’t work as well as the first. The rock out disc is more beefed up but it doesn’t sync up with the drone disc as seamlessly as the first piece. “Evil Wave Form” on its own works perfectly well as a standard Boris riffathon. It’s only about halfway through when the overdrive is turned off that the drone fits in with the rocking out. Once the overdrive comes back on the drone goes through patches of sounding great and sounding annoying.

The final piece, “Interference Demon”/”The Evilone Which Sobs,” sees the two discs working great together again. Disc Drone contains a fierce sounding drone (again occupying the high end of the frequency spectrum) that is totally at odds with the subdued opening segment of “The Evilone Which Sobs.” When the piece kicks off it is face meltingly good. It’s well worth the hassle of moving the spare CD player into a position that you can hit play on both systems at the same time.

Dronevil –Final- is a cracking album but pointless if you’re not going to do it properly with two stereos. Even though the discs can be played separately, it’s only together that they shine. I suppose they could be mixed together but then the fun of having four speakers around a room blasting from different directions is lost.

samples:

• Evil Wave Form
• Interference Demon (play simultaneously with the mp3 below)
• The Evilone Which Sobs (play simultaneously with the mp3 above)