Cargo Records

Super Roots 5

Boredoms' Super Roots recordings were released sporadically in Japan and various other world locales between the years 1993 and 1999. At the time, the group was championed by Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and signed to a multi-album deal stateside with Reprise, culminating in the release of their groundbreaking album Pop Tatari and a slot on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. Super Roots, in a way, chronicles the dissolution of that arrangement as the group matured musically. Wildly divergent and endlessly challenging, the series of transitional albums, EPs, and remixes presented ideas that remain consistent in vision and approach throughout each release, but which did not fit within the major works released by the group in this period (1994's Chocolate Synthesizer and 1998's Super æ), and helped to usher in the multi-drummer electro-trance onslaught of the Boredoms as they exist today. Surely these are among the most bizarre recordings ever issued by a major record label in the history of popular music. There's no effective way to prepare yourself for this series, save just diving in at the start and eating your way through. But get about halfway through, and you'll find the group tempering their wild early years into something that wrestles its demons down, then force-feeds them happy pills and takes them to a rave. When's the last time you were able to make that claim?

. It's unknown which members participated in the Japan-exclusive releases Super Roots 3 and Super Roots 5, but both discs share a similar aesthetic: ceaseless pummeling. Both consist of one long track apiece; Super Roots 3's "Hard Trance Away (Karaoke of Cosmos)" rages forth with a full half-hour's worth of unimpeded, breakneck, two-chord thrash. Key changes seem to occur at intervals, and vocal wailing blesses the last 10 or 15 seconds' worth of music, before cutting off and ending in three whole minutes of silence. If the first Super Roots was maddening in its frantic attention deficits, Super Roots 3 quells the frustration with linear, single-minded aggression. Divesting itself of anything rhythmic, Super Roots 5 consists of one 64-minute freakout called "GO!!!!!," which is perhaps the centerpiece of the series. "GO!!!!!" is sublime, sublimated crash for the end times, a mélange of churning guitar, electronics, crashing cymbals and bowed percussion. The track is endlessly inventive and in its subtle shifting and unflagging intensity; it's a warm, maximalist rock spin on Japan's then-burgeoning "power electronics" scene; a massive, molten copper disc absorbing all of the power of the sun. To say that future psych/drone-based efforts such as 1999's Vision Creation Newsun or 2004's Seadrum/House of Sun are not in part born out of the effort here would be misleading and, moreover, wrong. There is no Super Roots 4, either due to copyright infringement or superstition. The world will never

Track Listing

1. Go !!!!!