First time I saw Boris it was like ether and chloroform inhaled off cotton candy: beautiful. Enormous valleys of drone and riff, cut through with the soaring solos and vibrato howling, all rendered with a sense of unashamed melody and drama; rock history glimpsed through an endless neon prism kinda thing. Darkly crystalline, and the rest.

Next time I saw them, it wasn’t loud enough. I got drunk and asked the soundwoman to turn it up and she gave me the look of death. By the time the band got going, I felt like I could have stayed at home and listened to their records turned up halfway, except that there was a teenage metal girl being sick on the floor a few feet away from me. I ended up being more fascinated by her insouciant puking (she didn’t move away, or try to go do a sick elsewhere, just sicked at her feet, while her boyfriend looked after her. It was almost cool, she was so unbothered) than I was transfixed by Boris. Then I started feeling sick too, like she’d started a sick chain. It wasn’t the best gig.

Tonight, I don’t know what I was expecting. I hoped at least for the effect of that first Boris experience, its dizzying beauty;I hoped it would be loud at least. I was expecting a codeine moment or two. I wasn’t expecting FUN. Enormous, head-shaking, boinging stupid FUN. But it’s fun that I’m having, here at the Underworld, the best kind of Underworld fun, and Boris are having enormous fun too. They start with a sawing drone, and then proceed to bang out four or five thrashy, Blue Cheer-style numbers with more bounce and groove than on any of their recordings. It’s the best kind of preparation for their real speciality: the enormo-drone anthems, which are all the more beautifully molten as a result.

As always, Boris look awesome and incongruous: Atsuo on drums, in white blouse and Kate Bush radio mic, Takeshi all earnest and yodelling in his ‘HEAVY’ t-shirt, and Wata, the only guitar goddess worth speaking of right now in the current drought of guitar goddesses, dressed in a top that looks like it’s from Dorothy Perkins (neatly bobbed hair, deadpan face, impressive forearm muscles) and casting notes like they’re goddamn runes. My god. As always, too, they play beautifully, note-perfect and influences just-so; but tonight it’s like some ancient mischief festival they’ve got going on beneath and behind the music, some secret knowledge they’ve finally gained. It’s as if they’ve finally figured out that if they let us in on how much fun it is to be in Boris, we’ll have fun too and we’ll bounce the fun off them and the end result of all that bouncing can only be more sound, more harmonics, more stomach-dropping-out riffs, more iridescent soloing, more everything, more fun, more more more.

They end on a stately, ear-pummelling high, gongs included, and then they come back on and do something that sounds like Soundgarden. In Boris-world, quite clearly, anything goes, as long as it’s heavy as fuck, and for that alone it already feels like it’s gonna be a great birthday after all.