Boris: Pink

Boris is heavy. They are really, really heavy. That's a good thing, especially if you like heavy music. Boris is also experimental, and they incorporate lots of droning guitars and screeching feedback into their sound. They're reasonably talented on their instruments, and did I mention that they're heavy?

Unfortunately, they still manage to sound like a bunch of high school wankers sitting in a garage with a baggie of pot and a blacklight.*

It's hard to create experimental music. To do it well, you usually need either an innate and genius-level understanding of music, or the ability to master an instrument and then forget every rule you ever learned. Tuning your guitar down and cranking up the distortion might have been cutting-edge a few decades ago, but it doesn't cut it anymore.

(* Boris has released a whole bunch of albums in the past 15 years, many consisting of just a few very long songs. Pink is supposedly a significantly different album for them, so it's quite possible that they are a superb experimental band who fell short on this release. Or they could just be a bunch of wankers who are superb at giving woodies to record critics and insecure metalheads who feel the need to prove their intelligence and diversity.)

Music:
This is a good album if you are a big fan of doom metal, particularly its more ambient aspects. However, once you go outside the relatively narrow scope of that genre, this is mediocre at best. If Godspeed You! Black Emperor made a doom metal record, it would crush Boris under their own fuzzy limitations.

Packaging:
Kudos to the band for embracing the most un-metal of colors. The cover art features one of Blake's watercolor depictions of Milton's Paradise Lost, filtered in a cheery pink. The font color for the inner text is aesthetically nice, but it makes the words virtually impossible to read.

Listen if you like: Sunn 0))), but find Altar (which was recorded with Boris) too difficult; Black Sabbath, but find their early songwriting to be too mainstream; Tia Carrera, but find their Hendrix-inspired sound a bit commonplace.

If it were food, it'd be: ground hamburger being passed off as filet mignon.