Melt Banana
3+5
Release Date: Aug 23, 2024
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: A-Zap Records
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Album Review: 3+5 by Melt Banana
Fantastic, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 5/5
Melt-Banana is God's tinnitus. Putting 3+5 on while driving will have your car travelling at speeds where hitting a guardrail would instantly weld it to your front bumper upon impact. In the realm of white-hot noise-rock, all that contacts the plasma hurricane of their sound is liquified and emphatically danced upon. Its abrasion is a natural quirk, its riffs are funhouse torture devices, its ethos incomparable.
Based on rating 4.0/5
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.
Opinion: Excellent
A squeak, a screech, a battery of tortured guitar sounds, an ear-piercing chant, and they're off. It's been 11 years have elapsed since the last Melt-Banana album, a geologic era in pop culture terms, but the duo of Yasuko Onuki and Ichiro Agata seem remarkably unaltered. 3+5 sparkles and blitzes and caterwauls, a sugar-y tuneful-ness glittering amidst jolts of industrial noise.
Opinion: Excellent
It's been a little while since Melt-Banana graced us with a brand-new new album. Laying the foundations of their Japanese noise-rock style in 1992, since then, the band has continued to challenge everything we think we know about hardcore. Bouncing back almost a decade after their last album, 3+5 sees the band restore similar frantic sensibilities to Return of 13 Hedgehogs, while simultaneously testing the grounds for more experimental play.
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