Boredoms - Super Roots

Boredoms’ Super Roots recordings were released sporadically in Japan and various other world locales between the years 1993 and 1999. At the time, the group was championed by Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and signed to a multi-album deal stateside with Reprise, culminating in the release of their groundbreaking album Pop Tatari and a slot on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. Super Roots, in a way, chronicles the dissolution of that arrangement as the group matured musically. Wildly divergent and endlessly challenging, the series of transitional albums, EPs, and remixes presented ideas that remain consistent in vision and approach throughout each release, but which did not fit within the major works released by the group in this period (1994’s Chocolate Synthesizer and 1998’s Super æ), and helped to usher in the multi-drummer electro-trance onslaught of the Boredoms as they exist today. Surely these are among the most bizarre recordings ever issued by a major record label in the history of popular music. There’s no effective way to prepare yourself for this series, save just diving in at the start and eating your way through. But get about halfway through, and you’ll find the group tempering their wild early years into something that wrestles its demons down, then force-feeds them happy pills and takes them to a rave. When’s the last time you were able to make that claim? 1993’s Super Roots EP is the black sheep of the collection, and of the group’s entire catalogue. The recording features a slightly different lineup than on other recordings from the period (apparently, member Hira was on vacation and thus did not participate). As with most BOREsound, there is little to no precedent for the paths to musical product taken here, but with Super Roots, there are few guideposts to the sounds the group was previously known for. Even their most tangible reference points -- P-Funk, Ramones, Graham Central Station, hardcore thrash a la UK (Discharge), America (Septic Death), and Japan (Lip Cream), and Hanatarash -- are thrown out the window, as Super Roots comes off assaultive but playful; a well-executed hit carried out by infant assassins with toy musical weapons. There is hardly any bass on the record, and songs sputter out before hitting the three-minute mark. These mostly percussive, acoustic tracks rely almost solely on the performers’ heads, hands, and mouths to generate a restless, clanging racket. Witness “Pitch at Bunch on Itch” -- R&B guitar, metal percussion, and Eye screaming as if he’s being flogged. On that note, what is going on in “96 Teenage Bondage”? There’s no way to tell, but the group is at its most recognizable here, beating the tar out of electric guitar and rock drums. Untitled tracks burble with mile-a-minute auctioneer vocalisms and barbaric percussive assault, while others hand jive in an alien-nerd daisy chain chant (“Super Frake 009”). The disc closes with the aptly titled “USED CD” (most likely how wary fans purchased this initially), the sound of getting electrically sick in the bathroom of a Shakey’s Pizza. That this disc was once readily available in malls and chain stores from coast to coast is unfathomable; it’s easily the most entertainingly difficult music they ever made, short of their earliest offerings (thrill to titles like “Lick’n’Cock Boat People” or “J.B. Dick + Tin Turner Pussy Badsmell,” and you’ll feel right at home with the Boredoms’ pre-1990 output). Super Roots 2 was a 3” mini-CD given away to those who mailed in a coupon found inside initial copies of Chocolate Synthesizer. It’s not included here, but we thought you’d like to know. It’s unknown which members participated in the Japan-exclusive releases Super Roots 3 and Super Roots 5, but both discs share a similar aesthetic: ceaseless pummeling. Both consist of one long track apiece; Super Roots 3’s “Hard Trance Away (Karaoke of Cosmos)” rages forth with a full half-hour’s worth of unimpeded, breakneck, two-chord thrash. Key changes seem to occur at intervals, and vocal wailing blesses the last 10 or 15 seconds’ worth of music, before cutting off and ending in three whole minutes of silence. If the first Super Roots was maddening in its frantic attention deficits, Super Roots 3 quells the frustration with linear, single-minded aggression. Divesting itself of anything rhythmic, Super Roots 5 consists of one 64-minute freakout called “GO!!!!!,” which is perhaps the centerpiece of the series. “GO!!!!!” is sublime, sublimated crash for the end times, a mélange of churning guitar, electronics, crashing cymbals and bowed percussion. The track is endlessly inventive and in its subtle shifting and unflagging intensity; it’s a warm, maximalist rock spin on Japan’s then-burgeoning “power electronics” scene; a massive, molten copper disc absorbing all of the power of the sun. To say that future psych/drone-based efforts such as 1999’s Vision Creation Newsun or 2004’s Seadrum/House of Sun are not in part born out of the effort here would be misleading and, moreover, wrong. There is no Super Roots 4, either due to copyright infringement or superstition. The world will never know the answer, and we’re fairly sure Eye isn’t telling.

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