Melt Banana – Fetch – Incendiarymag

http://www.konkurrent.nl http://www.a-zap.com

32 minutes I think, in total. But incorporating a HELL of a lot of yelling. It’s a Melt Banana LP and I suppose we should not be surprised by this; this loud grind/math rock is what they do, incredibly well, and in some ways trying to decipher their new LP, Fetch, is about as culturally constructive as trying to convince Germany they should have the Kaiser back. Still, listening to records like these is often akin to eating those mad fluorescent sweets, they are packed full of weird ingredients designed to carpet bomb your senses and for a while it works; you can only think of colour and fizz and zing and wow and all that sort of stuff before you begin to feel a little sick.

That’s not to say that this LP isn’t enjoyable, it IS; it’s great, a blast even, and at times it kicks off into another dimension, through sheer force of will and the drill-like playing of the band. Things can even, if you allow them, to become zen-like; you can enter a calm mid-space, surrounded by all the battering that tracks like Lefty Dog, The Hive and Red Data, Red Stage throw at you. When this happens, your endurance becomes its own reward, its own endorphin, and you acquire some strange mystic glow. It’s like you’ve completed a marathon.

So, really, there’s not much to say except it’s bloody loud, intense, (though some bits, like the break in The Hive are breath-taking and the silence interrupted only by frog croaks in Zero+ are surprising), and getting too involved in the record from the off could see you an emotional wreck. Good fun though. I play it a fair bit, especially the poppy Infection Defective, when I need to shake some nonsense loose or I’m feeling goofy.