I recently had the great pleasure of watching the band Boris play twice in one week. The first was at Mr. Smalls on September 6, 2022 and again at the Beachland Ballroom, in Cleveland, on September 8, 2022.
I have seen Boris on two other occasions and each time they were better than the last. And that held true this time around even though there was only forty-eight hours between the shows. There were times during both of their sets that I was dumbfounded by how good of a band Boris is.
I make it a point to see Boris any time they come anywhere near me because I never know if I'll have the chance to see them again. Touring the United States is always a daunting task based solely on the size of the place and the long distance drives to get from town to town. Add to that a language barrier and that could make this a country a big and lonely place to try to navigate. And if I remember correctly, Boris almost called it a day around their album Dear so I will never miss an opportunity to be in the same room as that band.
A few weeks before the shows, I reached out to the band through the internets to ask for photo passes. I was directed to Aleš The Road Manager and was given the green-light to shoot both shows. Since I am a DEFCON one level fan of the band, getting to shoot two nights of Boris was right up there with shooting Rage Against The Machine back in July.
Boris had crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan in order to support their new album Heavy Rocks (2022). This is the third album they have released with the name Heavy Rocks and each one is a dense monster demanding the listener's full attention.
I had thought that their 2020 album NO, which was recorded during the compressed atmosphere of COVID isolation, was the best record Boris was ever going to release. Jesus jumped up Christ was I wrong. Every record that Boris releases feels like it's a line in the sand and they always cross that line by leaps and bounds with the next album. Heavy Rocks (2022) is no different and was somehow better than NO.
The new album sounds like they spent a lot of time with their Stooges records while writing the songs and took very studious notes. Horns and a piano have been added to the usual Boris face melting and I am here for every moment of it.
On this tour, Atsuo has stepped out from behind the drums to be the lead singer. Mike Engle of the band Crawl is more than meeting the challenge of sitting in on drums while Atsuo embraces his inner Iggy with mind bending results. I haven't heard Crawl's music yet but I will dive in face first with full curiosity at the next opportunity that I get. And I would really love to hear the story of how he got the job of playing drums in Boris.
The set list for both shows was the same and it was filled with songs mostly from NO and Heavy Rocks (2022). I was overjoyed to hear their cover of “Fundamental Error” by the band Gudon. I immediately fell down a Gudon rabbit hole when I first heard the song on NO and haven't recovered.
From the sheer weight of both of those albums, there was no shelter from the storm until the band got to “(not) Last Song” which was the last song before the one song encore. They closed out both nights with the song “X” which can be found on the Japan Is Loud compilation that Adult Swim released back in August. Members of opening band, Nothing, came out to perform “X” at a volume that could cause structural damage.
These shows were the first occasion that I had to see Nothing. I almost saw them play at a tiny club several years ago but had to bail on the show to help someone move. I really liked their album Guilty Of Everything but got sidetracked on their other releases. I will make sure that I go back and check out the records that I missed.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Christina Michelle playing bass for Nothing. She was the singer in a band called Gouge Away. Gouge Away put out some of my favorite records, in recent years, but I don't think the band survived the pandemic. I can add them to the list of bands that I never got to see.
Between the two shows, I did notice that the PA at the Beachland Ballroom was more powerful than the PA at Mr. Smalls. Either that or it was the difference between the size and shape of the rooms and their PAs. I don't know what was going on but it felt like I was being beaten from the inside out while I was at the show in Cleveland. I was standing stage right at both venues and didn't feel nearly the amount of discomfort in Pittsburgh.
I do think I may have witnessed a miscarriage at the Beachland Ballroom or at the very least some fetal brain damage. There was a couple standing directly in front of the speaker stack during Boris and I saw that the woman was pregnant when she turned around to lean against the giant subwoofers that were damn near shaking the plaster off of the walls.
It was so loud in that room that it was causing me pain so I can't imagine what that level of volume was doing to a fetus other than liquifying it. I guess going to a Boris show is one of the last legal methods to have an abortion in the state of Ohio.
