MELT-BANANA
3+5 (A-Zap)
It’s not necessarily extraordinary to record music for 30-plus years and stay on a sonically extreme frontier all that time, as Tokyo’s Melt-Banana have done – I mean, it’s a heck of an undertaking, but there are thousands of comparably venerable, comparably noisy acts active at this point. It does seem remarkable that Yasuko Onuki and Ichiro Agata, the two members of Melt-Banana, have apparently been satisfied with doing this band and nothing else the whole time, and not so much evolving their trademark sound (super-fast, yelping hardcore influenced by no wave and prog complexity) as sharpening it down to a gleaming and deadly nib.
One pronounced change to that sound was introduced on the last Melt-Banana album, 2013’s Fetch – unclear what they’ve been doing in the 11 years between it and 3+5, aside from touring fairly regularly – when they switched from human to programmed drums. On this brisk return to the fray, the duo dispense with the pretence of robotic imitation and crank those beats up to unplayable speedcore levels, with shrill euphoria resulting on songs like Puzzle and Stopgap – thanks in large part to Onuki’s vocals, which are jabbered out in exactly the same ear-skewering high register as on Melt-Banana’s mid-90s albums.
This fan’s gut feeling is that those albums, and the handful that followed them into the new millennium, are more essential MxBx (as ‘real heads’ call this band) than 3+5, perhaps encapsulated by all the songs having perfunctory one-word titles rather than the semi-coherent ‘maybe it makes sense in Japanese’ ones of yore.
On the other hand, anyone discovering Melt-Banana for the first time on 3+5 will doubtless have their wig knocked asunder by their sheer intensity, and they’re about to tour the UK (for nearly a month!) which should be jokes as ever.
words NOEL GARDNER
