Super Æ (studio album) by ボアダムス [Boredoms]

From teague 09/04/2021 21:20

This album will take you nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Pure noise and pure bliss. Yin and yang. But most importantly, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

From Arthurknight 04/03/2021 07:52

Japanese experimental noise music really is the best of its kind in my opinion. The earliest noise rock groups like Les Rallizes Dénudés, or Suishou no Fune were explicitly making psychedelic music (an aggressively noisey very much bad-trip kind). Remarkably, we can easily trace back this to technology: the Shin Ei and Companion "Psychedelic Machine" analogue effects units were really essential to crafting that sound common between all these bands. These units involved a lot of distortion, fuzz, and overdrive effects that would just crumble into noise with the inbuilt phaser. In particular I'd recommend trying out Fushisusha's "Live I". Boredoms is nothing like that stuff though, despite evolving from it. They're much more immediately comparable with fellow groups like OOIOO, Melt-Banana, or even Boris. Comparisons are abound, I'm clearly talking much more about anything other than Boredoms, or Super ae, or even their later similarly great Vision Creation Newsun, or even the amazing other projects the groups members are involved with, such as Boredom's frontman Yamantaka Eye's earlier band Hanatarash, or Yoshimi P-We's Yoshimi and Yuka...

Point is, you can't really describe Super ae, it's like glitch noise psychedelia? If Les Rallizes Dénudés were a group that just made fucking loud covers of the tracks used in Kenneth Anger films, Boredoms are a group that figuratively took those covers and merged them with sounds I imagine a computer would make when you pour hydrochloric acid onto it while trying to get email formatting help from Clippy.

From Fischman 01/18/2019 22:20

Okay, so there's some serious noise on this album. Screechy squealy noises and such.
... and there's some vocals that, if taken in isolation, would seem downright silly.

But in the context of these songs and the overall album, it all seems to make sense.

Fascinating.

What I really love is how all that weirdness builds tension and then the distortion guitar and drums burst in and, despite being 'heavy' instrumentation, relieve the tension and really get things grooving. There really is some clever and interesting drum work here.

I also how the album feels like a unified whole. The songs have variety but flow together nicely, logically and coherently, despite the seeming incoherence resident within individual songs. The album seems to know just when to tease and when to release; when to be off-kilter and when to groove.

I especially liked the three song sequence Super Are, Super Going, Super Coming as well as the very cool closer, Super Good.

Fascinating.

Out of this world fun and it feels dangerous. No album, not by Boredoms, shares it's qualities.

It's as if I'm climbing a mountain & there's endless joyful, ethusiastic interference. Down a six pack and hold on for dear life. Wonderful-

I have no idea what the point of this is, but this has to be one of the best albums I've ever heard. Easily in my top 15.

From CellarDoor 11/27/2011 20:23

Super awesome !