Boar — Tour boxset
The reason for the boxsets title is that this was original meant to coincided with one of Boars US tours, but for various reasons it didn’t appear until after the tour. The four cdrs come in a plastic sleeves and each features black and white artwork of pre-war & mid century glamour models. The boxes that the discs come in features a nice moody picture of a naked siren standing against a wall. So all in all an effective and nice enough artwork/packaging, through it’s all a little miss-leading as the theme most of the four CDRs is “Mister Be Gone" a 2007 horror novel by Clive Barker which charts the story/ diary of medieval devil/demon living in the year 1438… so not a lot to do with scantly glad pre-war models really.
Moving onto the ‘walled’ soincs themselves and we have on offer here over the four discs nine tracks in all which run between just over the five minute mark to near on the hour mark a picec. Disc one offers up three tracks, and goes from the slow boiling drone meets mid-pace and persistent static two tone rain fall of the opening track “Below Hell. Onto the just under thirty five minutes of “Hanging Steak!” which starts out for the first ten minutes or so with a drilling juddering and skipping yet locked static texture mix, then it adds in this great seared that slightly creepy mid-pitch fog horn sustain to the wall, before moving into a great battering and hacking judder. And lastly we have the rather lengthily entitled “ An Unknown Voice and it’s Encounter with Love” which finds Boar starting off the track with a seared yet strangely soothing slow motion bass juddering and rolling noise tone that’s has this slightly muffled ‘n’ stuck junk element on top. Then at just after the three minute mark he makes you jump out of your skin with a sudden texture jump to this clamouring mettlic alarm tone attack-this last for a minute or so before we drop down into this great dense mixture of sludge bass judder and skip locked static; with the skiping locked static tone really building and building this great feeling of tension.
Disc two once more offers up another three tracks. Firstly up we have the five minutes and few seconds of “The Smell Of Human Flesh” which finds Boar rolling out a deep & unbroken textural noise roast which is over hung by tight jittering static tones- that rather brings to mind locked boil tones, which are much like the sound of cooking flesh. The just shy of an hours worth of “A God” which offers up a rapid and urgent mixture of battering meets boiling noise drone that’s tied into a jittering caustic mid-tone. And lastly the just under nine minutes of “31 Slashings” which severs up a great taut, tight and suffocation mixture of jittering and juddering static texture, which keeps feeling on the edge of juddering to a complete stop, but never does.
On Disc three and we find two fairly lengthy tracks in the form of “Betrayed and Burned” which comes in just shy of thirty minutes, and “The Table” which is dead on the forty minute mark. The first track is a very urgent and fast paced mixture of almost groovy sped-up synth bass noise juddering ‘n’ hackings, and taut yet controlled static jitters. The second track mixes a long seared hissing tonality with rumbling juddering, the track nicely amps up the intensity in it’s last quarter as the hissing seems to get more boiling and intense in it's feel.
So lastly we move onto disc four and this features just a single forty nine minute track that’s entitled “The Machine”. This ‘walls’ first half mixtures together billowing ‘n’ bass juddering noise drone/roar with smaller & aggravated yet locked mid-tone jittering static tones. In the tracks second half it still retains the bass judder, but the static jittering tones become slow and more catching in their feel.
So in summing sonically this is a very rewarding, consistent and fairly varied collection of hard hitting yet creative HNW matter that’s both intense and atmospherically sound. Visual and package wise it’s accomplished enough for a DIY label, it’s just a pity that none of the visuals really relate to the inside sonics or their true themes.