Flood (Boris album)

Style

After adding psychedelic and shoegaze elements to Absolutego's noise, drone and punk aesthetic on Amplifier Worship, the band focused primarily on these new shades for Flood, adding to them a riff-based stoner rock alter ego explored a year later on Heavy Rocks. Sharing the one-long-song style used for Absolutego, the back cover lists only one song, but the CD breaks it down into four tracks. These indexes correspond to individual movements within the song, each recorded separately due to the time length limitations of analog tape and transferred and assembled in Pro Tools. Movement I consists of a guitar echo exploration, the descending melodies overcome faster and faster by waves of reverberating drum rolls; this ushers in movement II, first with Atsuo's slow, filtered drum beat, then joined with layers of reverberating electric guitar. These primary chord changes are refined for movement III, repeated at length and eventually featuring two vocal verses; halfway through, another echoing drum roll ushers in the climax of the song, a doom metal-esque section with soaring vocals and Atsuo doubling Takeshi throughout. The final riff of the album repeats with distortion through to the end of the movement, with the fourth and final movement exploring the riff with clean tones once again covered in space echoes.

When played live initially, only truncated versions of movements III and IV were used, as shown on Archive I and Heavy Metal Me; later, the band would play the full song, but with movement I replaced by a drone introduction. This arrangement is featured on Boris performing flood.

Personnel