Gig review: Boris at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

‘Do you remember the Pink days?’, enquires the subheading on the poster for tonight’s show, part of a tour in recognition of (almost) the 20th anniversary of the release of Boris’ 2005 avant-noise landmark Pink.

Some in the sold-out venue may wonder whether Boris themselves remember their most acclaimed album down to its finer details.

It’s likely that the tweaks to the original album’s running order and excursions to other parts of the Japanese trio’s extensive back catalogue during tonight’s frequently pulverising 70-minute performance are more to do with addressing potential issues with pacing than any recall difficulties.

The diversions from the expected script also help avoid the stale predictability that can hamper such ‘classic album’ sets.

Although Boris are a considerably more user-friendly proposition than many of their peers in the notoriously out-there and abrasive Japanese experimental noise underground, the power trio’s staunch refusal to pledge allegiance to any particular genre trappings is equally uncompromising.

As the Japanese cult heroes of avid decibel abuse start off the proceedings with the monolithically heavy slow-motion crawl (imagine molten lava pouring forth from the band’s stacks of Orange amps) of Blackout, originally roughly halfway down Pink’s running order, uninitiated observers could confidently file Boris under sludge-metal.

Barely without drawing a breath, the trio crash into a sequence of thrashing breakneck fury (including Pink’s adrenalised title track) that belies the trio’s foundational hardcore influence and feels impressively feral for a band who are on the verge of celebrating their 35th anniversary.

This leads to those nearest to the stage to instantly form a churning mosh pit which may take some of the more sedately head-nodding audience members by surprise and quickly turns the Brudenell’s Community Room into a very literal sweatbox.

Although the audience is dotted by people who are likely to be long-term followers, Boris’s gradually escalating reputation for authentically untamed intensity has clearly attracted numerous new converts; many in the sold-out crowd must have been barely born when Pink came out.

Tonight’s performance certainly merits such upsurge in interest. With guitarist Wata playing sat down due to an ankle problem, there is little in the way of overt showmanship apart from the enormous gong that drummer Atsuo (who also eggs on the crowd with classic metal-derived cheerleading gestures and shouts of ‘hello Leeds!’) occasionally gets up to bash.

However, the music – an amalgamation of densely layered sludge metal, majestic psych-rock, speed limit-smashing hardcore and doom-laden ambient – is more than enough to hold the crowd’s rapt attention, culminating with the epic combination of brute force and desolate majesty of Just Abandoned Myself (sadly shorn of most of its epic feedback coda) and Farewell.