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Melt-Banana, "Fetch"
A six year absence means nothing to Melt-Banana. Fetch is a minor refinement of past efforts in the band's 20 year career, unraveling over a bevy of short, aggressive songs to reveal itself as either an irreverently noisy pop album, or an intermittently poppy noise rock album, depending on your point of view. They have a knack for straddling the fence between kitsch and the vaguely obscene, and that grey area has never seemed so lived-in and comfortable as on their newest work.
The departure of Rika Hamamoto has served to further focus the distinct, poppy sound that became Melt-Banana's M.O. on Bambi's Dilemma and hinted at in past releases. At this point, all non-guitars and non-voices serve a streamlined, utilitarian purpose, aiding the lead instrumentation in overwhelming the senses. The hi-fi, crystalline mastering adds to the controlled chaos, filling the midrange to the point of aural fatigue. Yasuko Onuki's inimitable bubblegum-and-glass cadence has usually been the most difficult barrier to entry in enjoying Melt-Banana's brand of splintered noise rock. As Melt-Banana's grindcore edges were slowly whittled down and sanded smooth, though, Onuki learned to cut loose more, to care less, and to sing with a more confident, punky sourness which complimented the depreciation of the band's formerly caustic and incalculable melodies. Similarly, the guitar work of Ichirou Agata has grown conciser and more smartly composed; clear chords ringing through on choruses where before there was only hissing, ear-splitting saturation. The cacophonous pedal abuse has mostly been pruned down to staccato loops and the occasional laser gun blast.
Songs like "Candy Gun," "The Hive," "Lie Lied Lies," and the closer "Zero" are all instant classics as a product of this massively increased attention to detail. They are sharp without being impossible to like, and easily some of the catchiest material the band has worked with. Waylaid prior by extraneous band members, perhaps, this newest effort keeps a stranglehold on one idea and makes a killer argument for total musical tunnel vision, with a success rate that can sometimes seem to paint a lot of their past work as too cluttered. If that seems blasphemous, I am surprised too. Nothing overstays its welcome here. Even odd song out "Zero+" sells as an interlude, a glitched guitar cycling through accidental melodies before resolving in froggy silence.
In essence, Fetch is a gleeful embrace of the band's innate kitsch, which always lay under its surface. In past albums, it was an inversion of the trope: a rock band jokingly dangling its own freakish clone of pop cheer above the noise. Now Fetch finds them in contrast, having traversed the harsh end of the spectrum, finding there might be a way to write more accessibly without resorting to self-censoring their best qualities. A song or two flirts with thrash and some of noise pop's dancier excursions, occasionally at the expense of the reckless exuberance of earlier releases, but it is still one of the least commercial releases likely to be given coverage by more well-known publications. Jaded fans clamoring for a now uncharacteristic shift to the old familiar chaos have had about a decade to adjust, and if the biggest complaint to be leveraged against the band is that after two decades they have gotten a little more focused, they have nothing to worry about.
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