BORIS

I've been considering whether to give this album one or two stars for a bit. I think I'll know by the time I finish writing this review. That said, either way I must give you a warning: If you're like me and you wanted to check out this obscure album based on the overwhelmingly positive praise it's been getting on this site, stay far, far away. This is an album of demos for a reason, and that reason is that these musicians, while clearly talented, simply had no idea what in the blue Hell they were doing.

The first song opens with an embarrassingly dated onslaught of hippiedom, from the tambourine to the high-pitched vocals(more on those later) and the generic, throwaway psychedelic lyrics("I see a sun ship setting into port"). It almost would've been better if the song stayed this laughable, because most of the next ten minutes are a dull instrumental that sounds like it's trying to ape The Cinema Show and failing hideously. This applies to the whole album, as the whole thing reminds me of Selling England By The Pound as preformed by amateurs, but on this song it's particularly egregious. "Texas Armadillo" is filler, pure and simple, and the instrumental, while no great shakes, is perfectly tolerable.

Folks, settle in, because "tolerable" is the best this album is going to get, and it's all downhill as of Side 2.

"To-Ta In The Moya" starts out sort of promising, with interesting percussion and the singer's vocals clicking for the first time, but it devolves into yet another unremarkable solo, dominated by keyboards that would make an NES sound chip blush with embarrassment. Still, it isn't offensively terrible, it's mostly just boring. That "offensively terrible" thing is reserved for the final song, "Three Tons Of Fresh Thyroid Glands", which is every terrible progressive rock cliche lumped into one smörgåsbord of unmitigated catastrophe. The keyboards become even more grating, buzzing in the listeners ear like mosquitoes, the lyrics are half-assed Wild West tropes sung by someone who doesn't have a cowboy bone in his body, and the vocals can only be described as a crime against humanity-high, sharp and goofy, it's impossible to process whether to grimace or burst out laughing the first time you hear them.

It's not like there aren't a couple good things about this album-the drums are spectacular throughout and the bassist gets a really nice groove going for some of the songs. But the songs themselves are far too long, wandering aimlessly from whizzing, squeaking keyboard passages to impromptu flute solos without ever giving the listener a reason to care. When you add in the grating vocals, the most dated keyboard effects I have ever heard in my life, and then top it with the fact that the songs are too indulgent to be exciting and too spastic to relax to, you have an album that is completely impossible to recommend to even the most stalwart prog aficionado.

You know how people outside of prog circles will often call King Crimson "tasteful" prog? Well, this is what they're comparing it against. "Boris" is everything you think of when you consider bad progressive rock-it's indulgent, aimless, corny and dull, and it's concrete proof that good musicianship doesn't always mean good music. One star, and it pains me to give it, but this album deserves no better.