Is it a case of Stockholm syndrome – I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve met – or are Monet actually getting better? Hard to tell. Maybe it’s both. Or maybe it’s because they’re the aural equivalent of a Magic Eye picture – if you listen long and hard enough, it all gradually starts to make some kind of sense.
Swansea’s odd squad are on form tonight, a rubber ball ricocheting wildly somewhere between Wire and Mr Bungle. Bassist Garden Fence (a pseudonym, I believe) gets so caught up in the moment that he gives himself a bloody bindi from bashing his forehead off his instrument. It takes a certain amount of courage (or foolhardiness) to stand on stage in Cardiff and proudly announce you’re from the Other Place, but an appreciative audience are willing to temporarily set south Walian rivalries to one side and applaud Monet’s screwball rock.
Melt-Banana, meanwhile, are aptly named – implying both an ability to liquify solid objects simply by means of sonic onslaught and a surrealist sense of humour that prevents said onslaught from ever becoming too oppressive. This is music for jilted generations, for ever-shortening attention spans, for a hyperreal modern world in which everything is compressed and condensed. Every song is a blitzkrieg bop, a race against time, a dare to the crowd: can you keep up?
Much has happened since the last time I saw the legendary Japanese noise-punks on this very stage, in 2017 – not least a global pandemic that means that guitarist Ichirou Agata’s trademark surgical face mask no longer seems so unusual. For a band whose modus operandi is to do everything at warp speed, it’s remarkable that new album 3+5 has been 11 years in the making. Perhaps even they need a breather sometimes.
Not tonight, though. Agata regularly eyeballs the audience in anticipation of the havoc he’s about to provoke. But it’s his accomplice Yasuko Onuki who’s really pulling the strings, conducting the carnage with exaggerated interpretive dance moves and what looks like a colourful games console controller. Her capacity to conjure up blastbeats at the touch of a button, putting the digital in their digital hardcore, keeps us all on our toes – Agata included.
Contrary to punk principle, there’s an encore – but the astonishing nine-song sequence, most of them under 20 seconds long, underlines how they found kindred spirits in former tourmates Napalm Death. It’s over in a flash, and the Tokyo terrors are off to take their defibrillator rock to another town.
Melt-Banana / Monet, The Globe, Cardiff, Tue 24 Sept
words and photos BEN WOOLHEAD
