Boris + Planning For Burial, Electric Brixton, London

I get to Electric Brixton halfway through the first set, so I walk in blind. It’s dark and full of smoke, and I hear the noise long before I can see who’s making it. Not how I’d planned to start the night, but I’m not complaining.

Planning For Burial

Planning For Burial is the solo project of Thom Wasluck, and I find it hard to believe one person makes all of this. He loops his guitar, loops it again, and keeps stacking until the room is full. It sits somewhere between shoegaze and doom, and it’s loud enough that I feel it in my ribs. Arriving late, I miss him building the songs up and only catch where they end up, which is a shame. The floor is already busy, though, and people are actually listening, which isn’t a given for an opener.

Boris

Boris are touring 20 years of PINK, the 2005 album that brought a lot of Western listeners to them. If you don’t know them, they’re a Japanese trio: Takeshi on bass and guitar (often both at once, on a double-necked instrument), Wata on guitar and Atsuo on drums. They’ve been around since the early 1990s and have never stuck to one sound for long. Sludge, drone, psych, punk and plain noise all turn up somewhere.

It’s my first time seeing them, and anniversary shows make me a bit nervous. I already have the album in my head and I want the live version to live up to it. I shouldn’t have worried.

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Atsuo hits the gong behind his kit and smoke pours across the stage. There’s not much spectacle beyond that, and honestly they don’t need it. The lights are simple beams through the haze, so the band fade in and out of view. I’d expected the smoke to be a pain from the photo pit, but it suits the music and makes for a decent night of shooting.

Wata sits for most of the set. Every so often she gets up, shifts around her spot for a bit and sits back down. She hardly looks at the crowd, and that stillness somehow makes the sound coming off her amps feel heavier.

They open with the slow crawl of ‘Blackout’, then go straight into ‘Pink’ and ‘Woman on the Screen’, and the front of the room wakes up fast. Seven of the eleven songs in the main set come from PINK, with older tracks like ‘Ibitsu’ and ‘Akuma no Uta’ mixed in, and the energy never dips. On the record, ‘Farewell’ is the opener. Here it closes the main set, straight after ‘Just Abandoned Myself’, and it makes more sense as a goodbye. They still come back for one more, ‘Naki Kyoku’, in the encore.

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The crowd is a real mix of ages. Some people look like they bought PINK the week it came out, and some clearly weren’t born yet. There’s not much crowd surfing, but plenty of jumping and dancing through the faster songs, and the room stays restless right to the end.

I came in with high hopes for this one, and I leave with my ears ringing and nothing to grumble about.