Pop Tatari

We Say...

Review by Nick Southall

Now 15 years old, Pop Tatari still sounds fresh, invigorating, unusual and bizarre. Essentially the peak of Boredoms’ early career, Pop Tatari is a heady melange of furious heavy metal guitars, breakneck rhythms, sudden time changes and dynamic leaps, shouting, chanting, whispering, techno interludes, easy listening pastiches and countless other stylistic quirks. At first it seems almost completely insane, but repeated listens reveal a kind of brutal, twisted logic behind the madness.

There’s the bafflingly weird ten-minute genre-hop “Cory & the Mandara Suicide Pyramid Action or Gas Satori”; a song called “Bo-Go Bompoo," which, between the sheets of weirdly refracted ambience and grinding guitars, dabbles in rewarding funk; a tune entitled “I Am Cola” that combines metal-ish riffs with punishing stop-start drums and restless gibbering not dissimilar to the kinds of things you find Damo Suzuki ululating in the depths of Tago Mago; and the seeds of the blissed-out tribal shoegaze chanting & drumming of Boredoms’ late-period masterpiece Vision Creation Newsun are sown in the likes of “Telehorse Uma.”

There’s also insane epileptic disco, wah-wah’d guitars that sound like yapping dogs, a so disrespectful-it-becomes-respectful-again (sort-of) cover of Peggy Lee’s “Fever," plus occasional bursts of brass, electronics and what sounds suspiciously like a 13th Floor Elevators-style electric jug, from behind the yelling, thrashing, stomping and dancing.

Pop Tatari is infected throughout with the same kind of dark humor and anything-goes approach to art and culture as the film Tetsuo: The Iron Man. It’s perhaps not the kind of thing you can listen to everyday (you’d end up institutionalized), but when you feel the need absolutely nothing else will do.