- It's hard to know where to start with Japanese cult favourites Boredoms. They are forebears for a generation of noisy acts that combine atonal squall with tumbling, tribal rhythms and an eye for the absurd; Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, Battles and even Animal Collective all bear their influence. On record, they're a difficult band to get to know. Much of their back catalogue is shrill and at times unlistenable. Even if you're up for a challenge, the path to understanding them is littered with false flags and red herrings: sequential yet unordered EP series, random name changes (V∞redoms being a personal favourite), symbols in lieu of song titles.
Really, live performance is where Boredoms excel. Enigmatic frontman Yamantaka Eye is from an era when extreme music went hand in hand with provocative onstage antics—as far as staying true to the spirit of rock & roll, driving a forklift truck through a stage wall is pretty badass. That predilection for spectacle has carried through since the '80s: the first time I saw the group, Eye was smashing a seven-necked guitar with a cricket bat, while simultaneously conducting over two dozen session musicians around him, somehow finding order in the chaos.
The weight of expectation and uncertainty added a buzz to their London return. The venue had been switched a couple weeks before from The Forum in Kentish Town to Scala in King's Cross, where the stage is roughly a quarter the size. I was worried that this may have forced the band to downscale and I was right. Compared to their last London date, when they were joined by 88 cymbal players, Monday night's onstage set-up was sparse: two drumkits for core members Yoshimi P-We and Yojiro Tatekawa, a jumbled assortment of synths and effects boards, plus a ringed fence of dangling metal poles.
The trio took what felt like an age to begin scraping and tapping these poles—if this was intended to induce a trance, the spell was humorously broken when one rail accidentally came detached following a particularly hard thwack. But when they finally got going, it was thrilling. Eye's visceral howls and low growls were met with crescendoing cymbals and thunderous blast beats. The intensity rose quickly, helped by a couple of breathtaking moments when Eye was left screaming into the void. This didn't last, though. The band wound up squandering a lot of the tension by switching into a disjointed second song—35 minutes into the show—that never locked into a groove.
Besides pure propulsion and a clangorous din, this song offered little and soon wore thin. Elsewhere on stage, someone had emerged to jiggle some assorted mic'd-up household items around with a spatula. It seemed as if the band were being avant-garde just for the sake of it. The performance sagged from here on out and became a bit of an endurance test, which, I imagine, is what noise music is for most people anyway. When on form, Boredoms are one of the great live acts. Sadly, Monday night wasn't one of those times.