Review Summary: How can we change?
I've been thinking about the concept of penitence, known outside of the Anglican denomination as repentance, or penance, a lot recently. Ascribe it to shifting ideals about what justice entails, being struck dumb in the best way by Suttree, a healthy dose of guilt left remnant from my religious upbringing, a vain intellectual flaunt, whatever: more and more the concept, religious or otherwise, has an appeal.
In Eastern Orthodoxy, penitence transcends contrition and fear and even religious conceptions and becomes a negotiation between you and some kind of all-forgiving figure, right, but where it gets interesting is that the point is your penance is directly correlated against you performing an opposite, in a dialectic, or maybe just a yin-yang. Chronic adulterers will be asked to swear off Tinder; if you treat a woman badly you up your donations to Women's Refuge and go forward with kindness and compassion; if you're a profligate boozer you abandon the bottle and pick up an AA card.
So behavior is defined necessarily by its opposite, sure, yawn, but I love that idea of duality -- that for every act there's potential for a redemptive act to be found in The Opposite. Love and indifference. Doing and refraining. Light and Dark. Each extant on the spectrum defined by The Other.
Moenai Hai is an Opposite. It's the fruits of a sixteen year hiatus that followed their previous release, Saturday Night BigCock Salaryman, one of a handful of records I can think of that sound like what happen when the light at the end of the tunnel snaps out and there is, well, nothing, which means though it's not pleasant to listen to I think Saturday Night is, in its own way, heroically brave.
But how comforting to listen to Moenai Hai and look at the light shimmering. The antics have been toned down. It's still uncompromising, sure. Who the *** other than Juntaro would brave a harsh noise passage played off silence and a woodwork toy repurposed in an instrument and have it not come off trite? A 16-minute epic named after the band based on escalatingly desperate guitar riffs, including, at around the 8 minute mark, oneof the most anguished ones I've ever heard? To pronounce their return, they start with a crunching musique concrete session that physically tugs you into a train drawing into a station while a homeless person rants at you on the train, and it's disquieting and lonely and so atomised, but it's true to life, by its nature, in a way their previous excesses weren't.
Gone, alas, is the humour, and the tr00 no1ze (although the second track approximates the electric shock the best of the genre gives you in a woozy shoegazy blend), but what's new is the hope, the quiet spaces, the reflection and self-awareness and refusing to hide behind noise and shenanigans and just, forgive the entendre, but laying it bare. This is brave, and The Gero for sure, but it's an act of repentance. Juntaro has found comfort in the Opposite of the same sonic palletes they have always explored, which makes this not just a refreshing listen but a comforting one and, ***, an exciting one. It doesn't always work. Tokyo meanders as it attenuates, truly a cardinal sin, and if you're not in the right mood the sound experiments can be interpreted as a little, well, obvious, but when you feel like *** put it on loud and know that someone else is as broken, ***ed up and miserable as you -- and that there's a way out.
A testament to resilience, and the plummeting depths of misery, simultaneously: in a storied career of pushing musical, cultural and artistic boundaries, this might be their most lingering effort yet.
