198. Boris - Akuma no Uta (2003)

While it's a common thing to call a group "Zep-influenced" or (less often) "the new Led Zep", most often this is nonsense. It's easy enough to toss together a high-pitched lead singer, heavy drums and giant guitar riffs and assume that's good enough to make you Led Zeppelin (just ask the Datsuns, Queens of the Stone Age, The Dead Weather, Them Crooked Vultures, etc...) what made Zep special wasn't any of this but something less definable--something in the way they seemed less like a band than a rampaging monster, each instrument an essential part of the creature's anatomy, Bonham's biblical drumwork serving as the pounding feet of Godzilla destroying a city about ten miles away. Now this is a roundabout way of saying that Boris' 2003 near-masterpiece Akuma no Uta is the closest thing I've heard to the spirit of Led Zeppelin than the band itself. It doesn't seem like human beings are playing these instruments; whether it's through honest skill or through clever production (I get the sense the drums on this album have been distorted to all hell) it's there, and there is stuff on this album that reaches the same level of heavy rock power of "Dazed and Confused". The gorgeous and terrifying ten-minute instrumental that opens the record is the perfect way to get into things, and then from there the intensity never lets up, aside from a short portion of "Naki Kyoku". The album is well-sequenced and short, which is a godsend in the age of 78-minute "epics", as if sheer length were the only thing that constituted one. What I'm saying is that Tool need to listen to this album and then go and sit in the corner for fifteen minutes and think about what they've done. Also: the title, translated, means "The Devil's Song." METAL.

MY RATING: 9.1

Boris - "Akuma no Uta"