Melt-Banana @ Stereo, Glasgow, 12 Sep

Coming off the back of an 11-year wait for new music, Melt-Banana’s new record 3+5 felt like the return of an old friend. Admittedly, an old friend who has seemingly been preserved perfectly as you left them, so off in their own world that the tos and fros of fashion haven't made a dent in their commitment to being themselves. The same can be said of their live show.

Since 2013’s astonishing Fetch the band has stripped back to a two-piece live, relying on playback for their rhythm section. While it seems to be a rite of passage at their gigs to be taken aside by a middle-aged man and told that everything was better when they had a full band, the current set-up works magnificently. The dead insistence of their beats combined with Ichiro Agata’s maniacal guitar playing makes them feel like a cheery, hyper-colour Godflesh. With him foregrounded it heightens the joy of watching Agata and his 30-year maintenance of a steady contempt for the guitar as an instrument, uninterested in making it sing, focused instead on torturing it into a glitching, shrieking mess.

It’s not a set big on variety – their go-to mode remains wildebeest stampede through an amusement arcade, but it's hard to complain when they're this good at it. The chaotic flurry of sound that they unleash remains an absolute joy; surging and flailing, but playful at the same time. It's also that rarest of things, future-facing music that still sounds forward-thinking years after it was made. It dawns on you at certain points that this is a band who have been going just over three decades, and are not only bringing an intensity that outstrips their limply reforming contemporaries, but also of hardcore bands half their age. There’s little that can complete with the power of Yasuko Onuki’s lightning chirrup of a voice and infectiously buoyant stage presence. 

After playing a set heavy on their new record, they twist the normal one final time. Instead of rolling through their classics they instead do a whistle-stop tour of their grindcore origins, playing a battering stream of 30-second wallopers that pile-drive an already trampled room, Agata’s playing channelling satanic TV static into sanding belts of fuzz. From there they allow closer, and Melt-Banana masterpiece, Candy Gun to wash up in sumptuous flutters of ambient noise, and fly into its 'bucking bronco on fire' energy. An absolute barnstormer of a show from a band who are still a mesmeric, powerful unit.