Melt Banana

(Ok, I know this gig was a little while ago, but it’s only just occurred to me that doing a review of it is not simply a good idea, but an essential step forward in the path towards human evolution..)

Melt Banana = by far the best live musical performance I have ever witnessed.

So, what is it about this mad Japanese punk stuff that makes it … so damn crucial?

Maybe it’s just due to the fetish for Japanese pop culture that seems so prevalent amongst our faithful urban bohemians at the moment – I mean, lets face it, if a bunch of kids from Surrey made a similar load of completely tuneless noise they’d have little to look forward to bar complete critical indifference and a support slot with Napalm Death or something..

Or – more likely - maybe it’s the fact that bands like Melt Banana represent the musical equivalent of those crazy bargain basement Anime movies that you’ve probably watched at three in the morning whilst stoned and forgotten about, writing them off as some weird dream.
You see, both media take the bare bones of their creation from Western traditions (Punk Rock and corny Sci-Fi respectively) and use them to slam together so many exaggerated and conflicting versions of the over-familiar elements into such intense, fast paced and illogical sensual assaults that they transcend their genres – and human sensibilities completely.
Whilst makers of dodgy Western Sci-Fi are constantly attempting to justify their product with second rate attempts at character development and trying to be clever and have ‘moral messages’ and shit, their Eastern equivalents seem to take the far more admirable approach of “Fuck that! We can have giant robots and invading alien insects and gratuitous sex n’ violence and Kung-Fu vampires!”

Similarly, yer average bunch of Western punk rockers waste their valuable time pedalling the same old Ramones/Clash/Sonic Youth/Fugazi/Green Day (delete as applicable) stuff, whilst bands like Melt Banana sound like they start the process of musical creation by identifying all their favourite fucked up noises and figuring out twisted song structures that will allow them to make all those noises again and again in a really, really fast, really, really loud, mixed up and generally disconcerting manner.

So basically, the future of noise. A rather cool looking four piece vocals/guitar/bass/drums line-up band who make noises that are in a different fucking dimension to anything else you’ve ever heard. And don’t go writing them off as novelty thrashcore mentalists either – a thirty second burst of this shit contains more musical innovation than most of yer useless trudging ‘rock bands’ manage in an entire career.

And the ENERGY! Christ, yeah, I haven’t mentioned the ENERGY yet! The rhythm section hammering away like super-aggressive Drum n’ Bass being played live, the guitar (and to my untrained ears it sounds like about eight guitars) laying down a spastic wall of clashing random chord noise while at the same time sending out ear-splitting blasts of high pitched shrieking that bounce around the walls sounding for all the world like a concerted Tie-Fighter assault on the audience’s collective heads. And Yasuko, standing centrestage as the smiling public face of this unfathomable sound-blitz, providing Melt Banana’s most powerful weapon – her beautiful, multi-octave, speed of light shouting, ploughing through the incomprehensible anglo-Japanese psychedelic wordplay that makes up the lyrics with enough verbal dexterity to eclipse your favourite rappers and enough volume to actually be heard over the noise. The place is fucking electric!! It’s like being plugged into the mains after a lifetime of candlelight.. weird buzzings and bits of lost feedback are still reverberating around the venue when the band have left the building and the staff are sweeping up…

Beware, scenesters, the rock n’ roll of your father’s is dead! Shun those who would seek to revive it and pledge allegiance to the future!! (Ow, heck, just typing all that’s given me a headache..)