Boris Smile didn't really have me at hello, but I have to admit I was more than a little bit intrigued by the album cover! I know that's a real weakness of mine and I really should seek a 12 step program to get me away from it, but sometimes an album cover speaks volumes about what's inside... and as much as I know that often times it DOESN'T, I'm still drawn in. This time I was pretty presently surprised.
Boris Smile is a band from Long Beach California, Just outside LA. They consist of Guitars, keyboards, clarinets, trumpet, tuba, bass and drums (along with guest shots with strings flute and even choir vocals. They have all the parts that together could make an amazingly great and eclectic band and they come... well.. tantalizingly close to being that at times, but Boris Smile always manages to come up just short of greatness. That's not a bad thing necessarily as I think this EP will shore up their fans' love and bring plenty of new ones -- so they're still definitely headed in the right direction!
The first track, Beartooth (Spooky Version) is not so much spooky as it is awkward and odd. The lyrics, well I'll grant you they are kind of spooky.. you close your eyes you see him there. Much smarter than your average bear. He rips thru tents and cabin walls with the strength of hell and the force of Niagara falls... That's a pretty spooky vision of a bear comin' at ya. I like the way this song picks up frenetically from the beginning with strange, muddy mix, ethereal, excitable and on the edge of atonal choir and, of course, the loud and bangy drumming. So it calms down, only to build to a quick crescendo again with the parting shot: "at night when you lay down to sleep you hide your face beneath your sheets you made your house from sticks and mud and he'll huff and puff and boy he wants your blood..." The muted horns and affected string sounds keep this from being truly spooky -- offsetting yeah, but offsetting in a way that could make it get a pretty common rotation in my ipod.
Hour of the Wolf starts with a simple drum and guitar and more or less of a duet with male and female vocalists playing off each other. The message? "Everybody loves you but yourself." I wouldn't go so far as to call it a poignant moment, but next to a bear attack it's practically a love story!A full brass section smack in the middle of song three of this five song EP came as a shock, but the song was so disorganized around it, the brass chorus ended up lost in the fray. A quick duet at the end between Wesley Chung and Abigail Davidson saves this one from being just a dirty mash up, even with the horns coming back in at the last minute as though they were playing to another soundtrack. What is UP with that!?
Program me to Love starts off normally enough. "If you're talking technilogically, we're pretty much the same. You were made by the Japanese, I was made by the US of A. It's not fair to me or you that we feel like we do. So please... program me to love!" Now That's got a clever hook to it. The song goes on, slightly detuned, and with plenty of techno-entendre, but it's pretty straight ahead love-song-for-the-22'nd-Century fare and I like it!Finally, saving the best for last, Books of Blank Pages, is less emotionally guarded than the prior songs. "You took a chance, you made it fast, you made sure to keep it real. The camera's on, the lights are low, you still don't know how to feel. You never felt something profound to say."
Overall the sound on every tracks presents itself as a tight nucleus, with various parts and pieces trying to make their way out into the open air. Sometimes the result is a tantalizingly close representation of pure music, but only for a moment before it all gets pulled back into the jumble again. I like the lyrics, I like the sounds and the sonic shapes they are trying to create, I just wish they could pull them apart from one another long enough to really be able to experience the parts rather than the parts as part of the whole. This isn't Gestalt music... the parts are not greater than the whole.. the parts are just... parts and they're swallowed up by the whole. More of these guys. More of them not sounding like they recorded a full EP in a garden shed!
