To a good number of the people who went to the Intonation Festival last year, one of the weekend’s highest high points was Saturday’s afternoon set by the Boredoms, where Eye, Yoshimi, and two drummers blasted a crowd full of Sparksed-up Bloc Party fans with a faceful of powerful, meditative noise. Anyone who still had the Boredoms mentally filed under “sounds like warring chimp tribes hitting each other with guitars” was probably baffled by the eerily spiritual, almost sacred, power of their performance. The decade-long transition from the spastics armed with noise machines that the Boredoms were in their early years to the intense space-hippie sound of their recent Seadrum/House of Sun unfolded over the course of their Super Roots series of records, which is getting a new release through Vice Records. The first three — Super Roots, Super Roots 3, and Super Roots 5 — came out Tuesday, and the next three will be out on February 20. Over the course of their journey Eye & co. tear through experiments in structure and genre, like the one hour-plus track that is Super Roots 5 in its entirety or the fucked-up funk of “2” from Super Roots 6, and it’s all compelling as hell. There was talk for like a minute about Vice collecting the whole series into one boxed set, but that plan’s been ditched, so I guess you’ll have to go out and buy them three at a time. Your record collection will seriously be pissed at you if you sleep on these.
