Band:	Melt-Banana
Album:	3+5
Style:	Experimental rock, Noise rock
Release date:	August 23, 2024
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Code
02. Puzzle
03. Case D
04. Stopgap
05. Scar
06. Flipside
07. Hex
08. Whisperer
09. Seeds

Somehow, after 30 years, Melt-Banana are even more bananas than ever. You guys ever wanted to hear the slamming noise punk version of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack?

I’d given up on a new Melt-Banana album at some point in the 11 years that followed Fetch, consoling myself with the knowledge that they are at least a very fun live band (go see them); I don’t know what changed in the stars, but my favorite squad of liquefying fruits is back with a 24-minute speed boost, and true to form it’s as bright and random as the logicless blinking of every prop computer bank ever assembled for an episode of Star Trek. Yako’s vocals are even higher-pitched, Agata’s guitars are even squeedly-blinky-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-er, and the band as a whole has united the noisiest and most abrasive elements of its classic works with the growing fascination for melody and complexity that characterized the most recent albums.

Now well-established as a band devoid of live drumming, having toured and recorded with machines for years, Melt-Banana really lean into that arrangement on 3+5 – they can program whatever the hell they want into the rhythm section without any concern for somebody having to reproduce it live, and on this album they really go to town with it in a way I can’t remember having heard for a long time. Thanks to a more bruising robot drummer, more percussive electronics, and heavier guitars than what Melt-Banana have previously tended to explore, 3+5 turns the band’s usual chaos into something downright aggressive; the raw, abrasive energy of Teeny Shiny and unstoppable pep of Bambi's Dilemma meet here, twisted together into the world’s most pleasant headache. Tracks like “Flipside”, “Whisperer”, and “Puzzle” are practically full-on grindcore, bruising pell-mell with their frantic currents of heavy percussion and slamming riffs. Of course, wherever the heaviness threatens uncharacteristic directness, the glitchy and glittering electronic elements keep things from getting too monotonously unidirectional, and Yako always keeps things anchored somewhere in space with her squeaky hedgehog screams, making an impossibly bright contrast. 3+5 captures the tone of the live show very well: just a mountain of flashing lights and buzzing and pounding all hitting you at once.

What I love about 3+5 is that it isn’t merely more Melt-Banana music, it’s clearly the next step in their music. You can hear where they left off in their progression, the steady expansion of ideas from Cell-Scape to Bambi's Dilemma to Fetch: this is the album I had so hoped they would release after Fetch, harnessing these crazy sounds and erratic energies into something with some melodic firmness and emotional purchase, figuring out how to build substantial musical ideas into two minutes of screeching fuzz. They can be ferally unhinged and tightly controlled in the same instant: on “Stopgap”, for example, Yako’s vocal lines interact with the instruments to create a strangely dramatic melodic effect that you wouldn’t have gotten a couple of albums ago, yet it doesn’t sacrifice any of the stochastic punkiness that has always governed Melt-Banana. Agata utilizes a lot of bends and dives to rev up momentum, stirring up a lot of high-tension releases across the album; every other track reaches a point where it sounds like it’s about to explode into a cloud full of bees inside your brain.

You know in cartoons when someone gets hit in the head with a comically oversized hammer and they have little birds chirping around their heads? “Seeds” is the aural equivalent of that. Well, that’s Melt-Banana’s career in a nutshell, really. “Whisperer” has an extended(-ish, the song’s only two and a half minutes) sequence that I would undoubtedly call a breakdown if another band had recorded it, but even with this chuggy, half-speed riff wall, it sounds too bright and silly to be menacing, and that’s just how we love our disintegrating plantains. And I opened this review by promising Koyaanisqatsi: listen to “Scar” and tell me those weirdly atmospheric guitar ostinati and warbling electronics aren’t just Philip Glass and his whole orchestra being flung through the windshield of a truck at 150 miles per hour.

3+5 was one of the most unexpected album announcements of the year and it has manifested as one of the most welcome surprises. Melt-Banana has continued shaking up its style, growing heavier and more abrasive while carrying on the drive for compositional complexity. There are plenty of bands that employ comparably mercurial tempo shifts, texturally incongruent applications of noise, and this kind of piercing brightness – you’ll find similar DNA across various intersections of noise punk, grindcore, hyperpop, breakcore, etc. But there’s only one Melt-Banana, only one monadnock of messy mirth quite as charming and as stalwartly unique, only one band that captures the sensation of being crammed inside an arcade cab being warped through space. It feels great to get an album like this almost perfectly coinciding with the 30th anniversary of their debut, keeping the very same spirit going where it counts and exploring bold new sounds wherever they can.