Super Are

Before the Boredoms’ first show, in 1986, Eye didn’t eat for three days. He asked his bandmates, whom he had recently recruited, to play the most tedious music imaginable while he moaned—the only sound he could physically manage. “They all quit,” Eye told me, through a translator, when I met him at a Japanese restaurant in New York before a performance at Webster Hall last month. “They said it was too boring.” When the Boredoms started releasing records, in the late nineteen-eighties, their songs were concentrated spasms of noise. One involved nothing but a toy piano and the sound of burping fed through a broken microphone; another consisted of fast punk rock that stopped and started, the acoustical equivalent of Wile E. Coyote sprinting from boulder to boulder. Most of the tracks featured Eye’s vocalizing: a combination of strangulated howls and high-pitched screaming. The Boredoms’ music sparked with a youthful intellectual vigor; their records were exhilarating, silly, and sometimes almost impossible to listen to.

The Boredoms are the greatest band. Do yourself a favour and buy Vision.Creation.Newsun and SuperAre! Seriously. Just deliriously good.