Boris - 2013 - Boris Performing Flood

 

As time goes so does my attitude towards Boris shift back and forth. A love-hate relationship one might call it. Gone are my idealistic youthful days where I adored almost all Boris recorded and released but also are gone the days where I hated almost all of their output. There are some albums from this band that I will keep listening throughout my whole life probably and Flood definitely is one of them.

Recorded now way back in the, what I like to pretentiously call, golden era of their existence the studio album Flood definitely at the time was curve ball but surely signs of their will to experiment and change were all over the album prior this one called Amplifier Worship. This was the year 2000 and a lot of things changed for Boris since that album came out  but the legacy of their golden era stayed ever present. The year 2013 and s couple of next ones after it seems to me were of a retrospective tone, almost melancholic in terms of what they released. Aside from revisiting Flood in a live setting they re-released a compiled Vein album (initially released back in 2006), Solomon box set with some more unreleased tracks and an archival compilation of their glory days of Pink and Heavy Rocks. This sentiment of "back to the roots" peaked next year, 2014, when they would release an album called Noise which had nothing to do with the genre noise and three more albums next year which were very much noise in all but name (and were also fucking terrible). This is just my conjecture though, I'm probably reading all of this wrong but it seems like this period of trying to grasp at something they lost lasted until and including the album Dear. 

While I adore the album Flood I also think it's first and last part are self-indulgently too long and not that interesting. Exactly those parts are either trimmed or missing on this live record which makes it my preferred version to listen. If only it weren't so fucking rare to get it physically but at least we can enjoy it digitally. Maybe one day they will reprint it. 

If you are new to Boris or haven't heard the original album my suggestion is to go with the initial release first and then come back to this version. For all you seasoned fans I warmly recommend for this version to be checked out.

Get it.