Boredoms

The music of Japan's Boredoms once seemed to exist for no reason but to serve as a dare - an ultimate threshold experiment for avant-noise fetishists, most of whom understandably fled in terror from its graceless, purposeless racket. Who would have guessed, then, that they would eventually achieve a state of grace to equal the greatest psychedelic music ever made? Psychedelic, that is in its original spirit: forward-looking, unexpected, creating a self-contained sound world that carries the listener to some astral other. Rolling, hypnotic percussion acts as a mobile base from which artfully controlled guitar screech, nature sounds, tape manipulation and ecstatic vocal declarations (most of which are the album's three title words) bob and weave like a many-headed Jack in the box. A continuous, 68-minute suite, whose indexed tracks simply mark its ebb and flow of tension, Vision Creation Newsun genuinely stands among the most extraordinary rock recordings of the past several years. Is it a classic yet?