Boris and Michio Kurihara’s Rainbow Turns 20 With a Reissue and a Live Companion

The pairing of Boris and Michio Kurihara has always been a meeting of two approaches to heaviness: Boris’s patient, structural drone and Kurihara’s fuzzed, lyrical lead playing. Rainbow, their 2006 collaborative album, is where those approaches overlapped most cleanly, and Drag City is marking its 20th anniversary with a reissue on December 4.

The same date brings Live at FEVER 20181229, a full concert recording made 12 years after Rainbow’s release. Its 13 tracks lean hard on that album, including “Rainbow,” “My Rain,” “Starship Narrator” and “Sweet Nō1,” and the set list shows how these songs loosened and stretched once they were taken out of the studio. For a band as relentlessly documented as Boris, the release is less a discovery than a document, but it fills a specific gap: the point at which the Kurihara collaboration became a live proposition rather than a one-off record.

Anniversary pressings are routine now, and Boris are an unusual case within that routine. Their catalogue has been reissued and reconfigured often enough that the useful question is not what gets released but what a release clarifies. Here, Rainbow arrives alongside the versions the band actually played, which puts the studio construction and its stage life in the same place.