Review Summary: BANANA BACK
As has been said time and time again, there's no band in the world quite like Melt-Banana — and I love them.
I love their electric, frazzled, bracing intensity, the ecstasy that sears through every laser-discharge of Ichiro Agata's irreplicable guitar attacks, the hysteria that overtakes me on exposure to Yaku Onuki's helium-adjacent vocal eruptions, the priceless indifference with which mangles the English language into the most impossibly cracked sequences of grammar and imagery, and the overwhelming, joyous sense that at any given second, the duo are doing what
they love in a way that is truly their own. Beyond that, I love how finely crafted it is, how their chaotic tones, breakneck pacing and clashing ultraviolet melodies come locked into infectious grooves and structures that invariably know the perfect time to wrap up and pass the baton. I still find it amazing that they channel such
violent music without a hint of angst or malice, how they produce sounds and explore images so patently ridiculous without even a whiff of sardonic humour or acerbic self-awareness: these distinctions are endlessly refreshing in the landscape of heavy music (even at the expense of several other noise rock bands I'd count among my favourites).
They are joyous and precious and utterly indifferent to stuffiness and pearl-clutching, and I hope their music never stops speaking to me.
All this goes for
3 + 5, their long-awaited eighth LP and first since 2013's
Fetch: opener "Code" takes its time gzzzawwwing into life before exploding into the kind of rapturous stomp that will immediately address the concerns of anyone still wondering if this band is for them or not, and from there onwards the album is one rush of dopamine after another. Contrary to the decade-plus gap since
Fetch, Melt-Banana were never inactive in the interim years, keeping busy across the Japanese and international live circuits (their primary calling is arguably that of a live band); it's less cogent to see
3 + 5 as a 'comeback' as much as a direct sequel to the polished approach templated on
Fetch (which was their first album as a two-piece and, at the time, their most melodic).
If
Fetch ushered in a new version of the Melt-Banana sound and explored a number of possibilities for what could be achieved with it,
3 + 5 picks out the approach the band apparently liked most from that record and runs away with it: all nine of these tracks are lean, linear bangers that latch onto a verse/chorus structure and use it as a springboard for many of their brightest hooks to date. Anyone whose Melt-Banana go-tos include the likes of "The Hive", "Vertigo Game" or "Cracked Plaster Cast" will have great cause to rejoice. At its best,
3 + 5 runs rings around this songwriting formula and offers up a fresh set of keynote stunners: "Puzzle" and "Case D" are nothing if not a throttling good time, "Seeds" lays down an unstoppable heart-in-mouth runaway in alternation with a very welcome hint of darkness in its verse, and both the marathon arpeggios of "Scar" and the album highlight "Stopgap" feature perhaps Agata's most unhinged melodic work to date. In the latter track in particular, I find myself reminded of the iconic coda to Sikth's "Skies of Millennium Night"; it's hard to imagine a better prompt for a good ol' shiteating grin.
Some may raise eyebrows at the band's insistence on such a streamlined approach, and indeed at the album's flash-in-a-pan 24-minute runtime — these reservations are valid, and I personally favour Melt-Banana with more rough edges and off-the-wall variety. However, the precision and excitement packed into these songs is undeniable. There is hardly a wasted second on this thing, not a single gap in the energy rush it sustains, and I suspect it will fare extremely well in a live setting as such. Quibble if you will over this being the mode Melt-Banana have opted to commit to; we're still getting them at their best.
