ALBUM REVIEW: Bright New Disease – Boris & Uniform
Over the past few years, New York’s uncompromising UNIFORM have made notable and extensive collaborations with THE BODY in the form of 2018’s Mental Wounds Not Healing, 2019’s Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back and the live document Live At The End Of The World from 2020, as well as a remix project with ZOMBI, and the results of those collaborations have been nothing other than mindblowing.
Similarly mindblowing have been the collaborations that Japan’s BORIS have done over the years and they include albums with artists as diverse as KEIJI HAINO, THE CULT‘s Ian Astbury, SUNN O))), ENDON, as well as numerous works with MERZBOW. The point is, both bands are no strangers to working with others to find new and different ways to explore their music. Having toured together in the US back in 2019, the bands formed a musical kinship and thus the collaborative album Bright New Disease came to be and it shows the respect that both bands have for each other’s music to the fullest.
Straight away on opening track You Are The Beginning, Bright New Disease sounds exactly like you would hope a collaboration between BORIS and UNIFORM would sound and that is the industrial noise-laden hatred of the latter working completely in tandem with the riff-filled brilliance of the former; the results are simply immense, with so many musical ideas executed brilliantly on this album.
Tracks like the full blown chaos of No (a nod to the BORIS album of the same name), the epic The Look Is A Flame, and the dreamlike noise of Narcotic Shadow all fully explore different sonic aspects of both BORIS and UNIFORM and the melding of hardcore, D-Beat, industrial and avant garde grooves make for a wholly diverse and mesmerising listening experience.
This is an album that sees both bands explore and accomplish what makes both groups music so special and the highlights are plentiful. In particular, there’s The Sinners Of Hell (Jigoku) which sounds like a nightmare come to life but also has a cathartic heaviness running through the veins and soul of the track, while the grooving A Man From The Earth comes in thick and fast but packs more brilliance into its sub two-minute runtime than a lot of bands do over whole albums.
The track Weaponised Grief is really the only thing on the album that sounds like one of the bands on their own (UNIFORM, as it goes) and as good as that sounds, the rest of the album where the two bands gel perfectly is where it’s at and it is a joy to let the whole album consume you with its eclectic noise and power.
As Bright New Disease concludes with the weighty hardcore of Endless Death Agony and the heavyweight megalodon-paced harrowing sludgy groove of Not Surprised, you will feel joy at what you have just listened to but will be left reeling too with the sheer life-affirming heaviness that is on offer. There is so much to take in on this album that you will want to listen to it again and again and be taken over by the power of BORIS and UNIFORM working in tandem. Hopefully this won’t be the last time these two powerhouses of extreme music work together.
Rating: 9/10
Bright New Disease is set for release on June 16th via Sacred Bones.
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