Boris
The Fillmore, San Francisco
September 29, 2024
Photos by Raymond Ahner
It seems that each time the Japanese metal band Boris tours North America, they put a spotlight on past albums by the band. Past tours have seen them play albums like 2000’s Flood or 2002’s Heavy Rocks, and this year saw them celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of their second album, Amplifier Worship, by performing it in its entirety across the continent. A seminal work in the drone metal genre, I was interested to see how they would convert these monumental songs, some of them clocking in at over fifteen minutes, to the stage.
Once the lights went down, two of the members of Boris hit the stage: Wata on guitar, and Takeshi on a double-neck bass and guitar combination. Also coming out was guest drummer Muchio, who sat behind the raised kit on the back of the stage. The reason for having a guest drummer is that the band’s drummer, Atsuo, was on vocal duties for the Amplifier Worship album. After Wata and Takeshi began playing the opening feedback-heavy moments of album opener “Huge,” Atsuo came onstage to a giant cheer from the audience. Standing over the crowd, he looked like an illustration of a demon come alive, finally screaming the lyrics of the song five minutes into it. Once he was done, he sat at a smaller drum kit that was set up facing Muchio and drummed along with him for the rest of the duration of the song.
This would be the formula for the rest of the songs going forward, with Atsuo and Muchio’s double drumming meeting the intensity of the noise that Wata and Takeshi were making. I marveled at the band’s ability to make the resulting noise sound loose and spontaneous, but knowing that they had probably rehearsed these songs to death as to still be able to make certain transitions in the songs feel as powerful as they do. Case in point is the moment in “Ganbou-Ki” where Takeshi begins playing the bass and the song becomes far more rhythmic. With Atsuo and Muchio laying down the rhythm with Takeshi, Wata was free to manipulate her guitar with the standing effects unit in front of her, elongating the echo and reverb time of her notes and chords while the rest of the band kept up the foundation of the song.
Amplifier Worship clocks in at just over an hour in length, so to extend the length of the concert they added two songs to the setlist that were played around the same time as they initially toured for the album: the relatively short and hard-hitting “Scar Box” and the longer and equally as hard-hitting “Mass Mercury.” Both songs fit in perfectly with the rest of the set, and it was a treat to see these songs in a live setting, both of which hadn’t been played in over a quarter of a century. That was actually something of note regarding the five songs on Amplifier Worship: despite the fact that two of them hadn’t been played since the late 1990s, the band pulled off playing them live as if they had been staples of their setlists for years.
After “Kuruimizu,” Atsuo told the audience, “Last song.” And we were treated to the searing “Vomitself.” This song was the true test of those in the audience. Fifteen minutes of a formless barrage of feedback and drum hits, Atsuo holding a pedal in his hand that he used to create a high-pitched feedback that cut through the guitars and drums. It was loud, cacophonous, and all-encompassing, and it is a true testament to Boris as live performers that they are able to pull off a song as monumental as this without it ever feeling like the song is overstaying its welcome. And then as soon as it began, the song was over, silence cutting through the venue, replaced by the cheers of the crowd as the band left the stage.
For their encore, the band returned to the stage and performed only one song, “Loveless” from their 2020 album NO. Despite it being released over twenty years after Amplifier Worship, it felt like the perfect closer for the evening, another long song that makes use of every second of its running time. At one point Atsuo climbed into the audience, yelling the lyrics into the faces of the members of the audience that were holding him up while the rest of the band pounded their way through the song. And then, as soon as it started, it was over. Atsuo waved goodbye to the audience, Takeshi thanked everyone for coming, and the band took their final leave off of the stage. I can only wonder what album the titans will decide to bring overseas next year, but until then I have the memory of having my body shaken for ninety minutes by one of the greatest modern bands.
Opening the evening was the Los Angeles outfit Starcrawler. The saying goes that if you don’t have anything nice to say to not say anything, but for the sake of this testimonial I’m going to ignore that. I had seen Starcrawler once before years ago opening for The Distillers, and once their set ended I was left with the same thought now as I did then: they strike me as rich kids cosplaying as punk rockers. Fortunately it wasn’t just me, as seemingly the entire audience wasn’t into it, which caused singer Arrow DeWilde to try to irk the crowd by referring to San Francisco repeatedly as “Frisco” after commenting, “Last night in Fresno was better than this shithole.” I have a friend who had seen them in Fresno the night before who said that Arrow said something similar onstage then. The rhythm guitarist had his own guitar tech who swapped out four guitars throughout their set, which is weird because they all sounded the exact same to me, while the lead guitarist had multiple guitars as well that, you guessed it, sounded the exact same. After an excruciating forty-five minute set of what sounded like one song played repeatedly ten or eleven times, they left the stage.
