I made some sushi the other week. Well you could hardly expect to have been invited after the scene you made last time. I didn’t know what to say, where to look, or which cleaning product I should be using to get that out of the carpet. Anyway, I discovered that making sushi is a bit on the fiddly side. I remember that I had been working on one particular item for about fifteen minutes, when I stopped and looked at it, and realised all I had was wet cabbage. Given how long they spend on making their food, I’m surprised that the Japanese even have time to eat, never mind make ever-growing mountains of blistering psych-rock albums.

And not just that, but make two versions of them. The Japanese and Southern Lord versions of the album have different covers, different tracklistings, different versions of the same tracks, different smells most likely. Some of the tracks on here will be familiar to anyone who saw them at ATP last December (or I would assume, their other non-Altar shows at the same time). In particular I distinctly remember their version of the hippily-titled “Flower Sun Rain” rising from betwixt the curtain of dry ice and the colossal wall of speakers; the version on here adds some guitar from their collaborator on Rainbow, Michio Kurihara. “You Were Holding An Umbrella” starts off similarily, a slowed down Damo-era Can ballad perhaps, before being split asunder halfway through by some doom-metal chords. It then goes somewhere else entirely, guitarist Wata taking the whole thing to the moon with some coruscating white noise. And not for the first time: on “Laser Beam/Shoot” she seems maniacally inclined to destroy her speakers, this tiny human producing the biggest noise, like the high end shrieking of a million metallic blackbirds. The huge untitled track that sits glowering astride the second half of the album is hard to ignore, lumbering as it does from spacey Popol Vuh ambience to droning whiteout, picking up Stephen O’Malley and an addictive repeated vocal refrain on its epic journey.

By virtue of its variety, invention, and (most importantly) the plethora of sick guitar noises contained herein, this may well be my favourite Boris album. However they slice and dice these tracks for serving over here, it’ll be worth the wait (more so than my wet cabbage was anyway). Smile is available in April from Southern Lord; listen to “Statement” courtesy of them too.