Since they started back in 1993, Melt-Banana have remained like an eye of a hurricane that’s 10 times crazier than the hurricane itself. One of the core bands to emerge from the same roiling soup that birthed art-damaged titans such as the Flying Luttenbachers and the Locust, the female-fronted Japanese group added a few twists to the genetic makeup of 90s noise rock. Japan’s own rich noise tradition was little more than a touchstone for Melt-Banana, and the group’s cryptic otherness elevated it above its peers. It was easy to see that Weasel Walter was a virtuoso slumming it, and that Justin Pearson was a snotty powerviolence kid with a schtick. But Melt-Banana? Who knew what they were thinking? After a six-year break from making studio albums, the new full-length fetch doesn’t answer that question. But it makes that question even more head-spinning.
Melt-Banana left listeners on a curious note with 2007’s frighteningly poppy Bambi’s Dilemma, but that dissonance has been resolved on fetch, in true Melt-Banana fashion, with more dissonance. This is the Melt-Banana of their mid-90s prime: salivating Pavlovianly over the acceleration of culture, twisting the tools of psychedelia into things of surgical precision, and envisioning cyberpunk grindcore before reality knew it could bear the weight of such a thing. It still might not—but fetch at least harmonizes more disharmoniously with the tenor of the times. Gleeful terror pours out of tracks like “Candy Gun” and “Then Red Eyed”; the fact that they’re the longest and shortest song on the disc, respectively, only bookends the dilation of spacetime that guitarist and effects technician Ichirou Agata is able to accomplish. Like a proto 8-bit composer using a looping delay pedal to preemptively echo a deterministic future, he’s a watchmaker winding up a thousand thrash riffs at once then letting them go.
It’s up to Yasuko Onuki to lend a human voice to Agata’s nanotech contraptions. She’s never sounded more savagely ecstatic. On “Red Data, Red Stage” she’s like Dog Faced Hermans’ Marion Coutts sprinting on bipolar impulse, all Situationist cheerleader chants and sugary chirp. Phonetically, it’s all splinters and crystal. Melt-Banana’s grindcore roots, vestigial in the first place, are now only dim memories. Just as the quaint notion of sudden, cataclysmic apocalypse has been replaced in the new millennium by gradual, nonlinear collapse, so does fetch frolic in anachronism, a swarm of data-fragments retroactively reordered and held together with hair and bubblegum. “The Hive” is proof: An intro that resembles “Eruption”-era Eddie Van Halen eaten some yet unimagined remake of Tron opens space for Onuki’s sideways singsong, the filtered cry of bitmapped anxiety.
That Melt-Banana is making some of the best music of their career—over 20 years into the band’s existence—speaks to the universal and transcendent quality of their noise. The landscape of media, society, and even the microcosm of noise rock has changed greatly, but Onuki and Agata have locked jaws on the diametric constants: energy versus agitation, phobia versus euphoria, and instant nostalgia versus the relentless pursuit of the upgrade. fetch is Melt-Banana’s own upgrade, a bleeding-edge reiteration of their fractured and manicured chaos. There’s a moment in the album’s closer, “Zero”, in which Onuki punches her way through a web of Möbius-strip riffage to project a fleeting, Technicolor afterimage of Dilemma’s pop-punk melodicism; then it seizes up, hits the gas, and splatters against a brick wall. A moment later, it reconstitutes itself and barrels forward as if nothing happened. In a breathless whirlwind kind of way, fetch does the same for Melt-Banana.
