Melt-Banana – 3+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. In a musical age where 30-minute "micro albums” are EPs in trenchcoats passing themselves off to Spotify, Melt-Banana infuses nuclear wind into microseconds, leaving every minute an escapade worthy of analysis. 

While not as sparklingly euphoric as their previous album, 2013's Fetch, their long-expected return is a collection of brazen, seering energy beams, like being hunted with a dragon’s breath shotgun in Akira’s Tokyo. It’s decidedly muddy, underscored by squelching synths and piston-engine drumming; there is also a non-zero possibility that any one of this record’s guitar riffs could insight a group of pacifists to riot. The image of a CRT monitor strapped to a guitar being driven into my head is apt; I come to Melt-Banana for the most welcome of brutalizations.

Listen: Puzzle, Code, Stopgap