Boris vs. my metadata autism

[16-11-2025]

I've recently been getting into the Japanese experimental metal band Boris. Boris have countless albums that span a variety of different styles, and going through their discography and discovering the different facets of their unpredictable sound to slowly piece together a complete understanding of what this band is, while having it simultaneously push my musical boundaries by introducing me to genres I hadn't properly listened to be before, like drone and doom, has been very interesting and rewarding. But this isn't actually about their music, at least not directly, this is about a much more boring topic that is frequently on my mind that Boris serve as a perfect example for.

I am very fussy with how my digital music collection is categorized. This is in part because I want my own music library to be tidy and well organized, but also to have its metadata match up with the databases on last.fm and have it track consistent and comparable listening statistics for me. In order to achieve this, I want all the songs to be tagged, with consistent spelling and punctuation, with its original, true name. Same with album names. Things like (Remastered), (Deluxe Edition), (live) and the like that you often see on streaming services I remove, because these aren't part of the name. If, for example, I would listen to Chumbawamba's song Timebomb in its album version, then its single version, and then its live version, I would want them all to be scrobbled as just Timebomb, because they are still fundamentally the same song. I don't want the single version of Timebomb to split my total listening count on Timebomb just cause of a minor difference that causes a different tag and result in an inaccurate total count of how often I listened to the song Timebomb. Presently, I listened to the song Timebomb 57 times, and I don't care if it's the album version, single version, or live version. It's still the song Timebomb and it deserves to get the full credit of being listened to 57 times.

There is an exception to this rule, however. And this is when there are two different releases under the same name. This often happens when an album has a single release of its title track. If I were to listen to the maxi single of Green Day's American Idiot, the title track of the album of the same name, I would tag the album name as American Idiot (single), to differentiate it from the album American Idiot. Sometimes bands also use the same album name multiple times, which most commonly happens with self- or untitled albums. An example for this would be Killing Joke. Both the band's 1980 debut and the album from 2003 are called Killing Joke, so my copy of the 2003 album is tagged as Killing Joke - 2003 to not falsely inflate the numbers on the debut album also named Killing Joke. This brings us to Boris: They have three albums named Heavy Rocks, one from 2002, one from 2011 and one from 2022. On my end, they are tagged as Heavy Rocks (because it's the first one to use that name so it has the privilege to use the name without additional qualifier), Heavy Rocks (2011) and Heavy Rocks (2022) respectively. Easy enough.

Now, let's look further in their discography. It's not uncommon that certain regions get different bonus tracks on an album, which often leads to streaming services tagging albums as a (US version). I would remove that, the same way I remove (deluxe edition). To me, this is all within the spectrum of the original album release, everyone knows that the bonus track was released with the original album. Even if it's not on every version, it is part of that release. Looking at the Wikipedia page for Boris' 2008 album Smile, however, you will read 'Shortly after this initial release, the album was released by American label Southern Lord with a slightly different track listing, different artwork, and an almost entirely different sound'. Hold up. So they just made a new album then? You're telling me that there's two albums released under the name Smile, one in Japan and one in the US? And they're different, mutually exclusive albums? In this case, I will refer back to my differentiation rule from above. Here, I would make the argument that Smile JP and Smile US are different albums, in which case I tag the US version as Smile (US version). Okay, problem solved.

Except now, I have to deal with Japanese song titles. This is a common problem with Japanese bands, the bands often do their promotion in Japanese, the physical album names print titles in Japanese, but streaming services and common tagging conventions use Latin writing to make it easier for a global audience. So what do I tag the songs as? Personally, I prefer tagging them the way they are listed on the physical original release, so generally I would want to use Japanese characters. Even if that makes it hard for me to recognize song titles, the peace of mind of ensuring I consistently use the original name is worth it. Except now, I have those two versions of Smile. The vast majority of song titles on the Japanese release are spelled in Japanese, while the US version writes them out with Latin characters. Although I had already decided that the two versions of the album are different enough albums that I want to separate them, this is less clear to me on a song-by-song basis. I said earlier, that I prefer having the song scrobble as the same song, even if it's two different versions of said song, in which case that would mean I would use the Japanese spellings also for the US version. Simultaneously though, the thought of having the album explicitly labelled (US version), and then contain songs with Japanese characters, which is very much not what they are called in the US version, makes my skin crawl. So, through gritted teeth I decide to give both versions their own song title spellings, even if that means that メッセージ and Statement would scrobble separately, even though they're different versions of the same song. You win some, you lose some.

Okay, moving on. The 2005 album Dronevil is a drone and doom metal double album, where 'the original intention is for both to be played simultaneously'. Sigh. Okay, so this thing has two discs, both of them with two songs of around 20 minutes and their own individual song titles. You're supposed to put on both discs on two separate stereo systems and stand in the middle of both of them. Okay, sure. So to listen to this album, you need to listen to both Loose and Red simultaneously. How do I do this with my digital copy? How do I scrobble this? How does ANYONE do this? Seriously, who has two full stereo setups right next to each other? Many fans were asking the same, so lucky for me, just earlier this year, the band released a new version of the album, titled Dronevil - example -, where both discs of the album are mixed together. This solves the problem of listening to it, but brings up new problems: First of all, I have to decide if Dronevil - example - is a different album from Dronevil. I'd say yes, because playing both simultaneously is a fundamentally different composition than just one at a time. Okay, album tag problem solved. Song titles? Same thing. The Example version tagged its track 1 as Loose x Red, which is a different composition than just Loose or Red on their own. So I can consider that a new song, fine. Another problem solved. Now, the release year. When I look at my library, I want the albums to show up chronologically. Dronevil was released 2005 and should correctly show up between the other two releases Soundtrack from the Film Mabuta No Ura and The Thing Which Solomon Overlooked. Except I had just decided to use the 2025 Example version for my collection, cause I cannot listen to the original the way I was supposed to, so having it at all seems kind of pointless and the only way for me to come close to hearing the intended composition is by using the Example version. I had also decided that the Example version should be considered a separate album. But that version was released in 2025, not 2005. Which means I now have a gap in the chronological timeline of their albums, cause the original 2005 version is not properly listenable to me. Another blow.

Okay, what torment do you want to put me under next, Boris? Look no further than just one year later, 2006s Vein. This album is a bit misleading, because it's actually two albums, except they don't really tell you that. There's one that's a hardcore punk album (12 tracks) and one that's a drone / noise album (2 tracks). Furthermore, none of their tracks have any names. So both albums are called Vein and all 14 tracks are called [untitled]. Great. Furthermore, the album was re-released in 2013. This version kind of mashes up both of the previous versions of the album into a single disc of the same length, making use of songs and sections from both original albums. Still, all tracks are untitled. In 2020, the band re-released the album, again, but this release is both 2006 versions bundled together, except this version does not split up the tracks, and instead has one track per original vinyl side and naming them to spell out the album name: V, E, I and N. First of all, which versions do I take? Initially I just took the 2006 hardcore punk version, cause for some weird reason, I considered this the original, while the others were derivatives. But that's not true. The 2006 hardcore punk version is only half of the entity that is Vein. I considered the 2013 version, but that one's a new composition again. It's based on the originals, but it's a new album. So okay, I'm taking the 2013 version as its own standalone thing. But what do I do with the rest? The two originals or the 2020 re-release? I don't need both, the 2020 is the same in content, just different in format. Although it pains me to, once again, leave a gap in the canonical album chronology by deciding against the 2006 original, the 2020 re-release solves a couple of problems. See, I still have the issue of none of the songs having actual titles. I don't want them all tagged as [untitled], because this would result in [untitled] becoming my most scrobbled Boris song by a mile, because a single listen of Vein would rack up up to 14 scrobbles under this title, even if they're all different songs. The alternative is to number them, similarly to how tracks on the band's one-track-albums Flood and Feedbacker are labelled that are just split up for convenience's sake: Vein, Part 1; Vein, Part 2; etc.. If I were to use the 2006 versions and the 2013 version, each of these releases would have track listings like Vein, Part 1; Vein, Part 2; etc., but the numbers would end up referring to different tracks. Don't like that. By deciding to take the 2013 version and the 2020 version, I can leave the short individually numbered tracks to the 2013 version, because the 2020 names its tracks V, E, I and N.

Neither of these problems are unique to Boris. Being a fanatic last.fm user and armchair librarian, you run into issues of that sort quite regularly and need to make calls on how to solve them. But Boris really is a special case because they seem determined to combine all of the potential scrobbling problems into one discography. But that's also part of what makes them fascinating. Whether you're a thorough, curious listener or an overzealous cataloguer, they kinda force you to spend time and thought with them.