Paul Stephenson
It’s rare, in these times of such hyper-focused niches and genre back alleys, to find a band so cheerfully idiosyncratic and unique as Boss Keloid. Right from their first Angular Beef Lesson, through them asking you to Herb Your Enthusiasm, to Family the Smiling Thrush, there’s really nobody who you can point to and say ‘that sounds like Boss Keloid.’ And now they’re back, five years on from that particularly entertaining headscratcher, and there’s still no one out there quite so thoroughly melted on their inch.
If you’re not familiar, describing the Keloid sound is a bit like playing Cards Against Humanity, only with musical genres. Ostensibly a prog metal band, they’re also a sludge band, but they’re also heavily jazz-influenced. Oh, and of course, they’re a stoner band. But if you closed your eyes and tried to summon what that particular alchemical bombination might sound like, you’d likely get nowhere near. And now, on their fourth full-length, they’re even harder to pin down.
Take opener ‘Breeze’, which arrives with a chorus so light, so melodic, and tinged with ennui, that you wonder if the wonders from Wigan are about to present us with a complete about-face, stylistically. A playful lead line dances above the riff, and the rhythms have an almost lackadaisical louchiness. But there’s so much grit under the fingernails, too.
This has always been Boss Keloid’s superpower: that juxtaposition between soupy prog-gasms and melodic majesty, and on Float & Aperture they lean into the latter even harder, without ever leaving the former behind. Yes, this is progressive music, with more time signatures than you can shake a metronome at, and yes, it’s constantly twisting and turning itself down melodic avenues that are surprising and delightful, but what could easily drift into the arena of the overly wanky is always pulled back by a soaring vocal melody that anyone in Baroness or Mastodon would frankly chew your arm off to be able to conjure these days.
While Float & Aperture may lack some of the crunchiness of their previous works, that’s been replaced by a sense of ethereal calm, a greater sense of light and air than we’ve seen from them hitherto.
That’s most starkly shown on the penultimate track, ‘Accord‘, which starts with a playful, bluesy, jazzy riff, before spiralling off into something altogether stompier, grander in scope. But even with that stomp, and despite this album having tracks called ‘Landslide’ and ‘Weight’, there is something refreshing and bright about this whole album.
Overall, Float & Aperture is a delight of an album, full of the twisting, turning, sludgey prog that we know and love, but it’s so much more than that. It’s beguiling, bewildering, and brilliant and likely to make a late run onto a number of best-of-the-year lists.