Let There be Doom

Maio 14th, 2009 • música
Tags: arte, discos, distortion pedals, doom, metal, review, twitter

The last thing anyone expects at age 38 is to become a fan of something called “doom metal.” But one evening I asked a friend—a perfectly reasonable 42-year-old, gainfully employed with a nice family—what kind of music he enjoyed, and his fateful answer dropped like an anvil: “Metal.” Professional curiosity led me to join him one night at the Knitting Factory, where I bore witness to the work of a Japanese doom-metal band called Boris: four silhouetted figures on a fog-choked stage, laser lights shooting from behind their heads, playing the absolute loudest music I had ever heard in my life.

Imagine if someone put a microphone to rows of ocean waves battering a rocky shore and then ran the result through distortion pedals and a wall of eight-foot amplifiers. Like that. At one point I wondered if city ordinance allowed for volume this high: My skin vibrated over my bones, the ground rumbled underfoot, my eardrums shook as people around me, evidently familiar with the ritual, began inserting ear plugs. Penetrating guitar chords pounded for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, with majestic, just-perceptible songs buried in the distortion. When the fog momentarily cleared, a tiny Japanese woman was playing the guitar. Read more »