MELT BANANA: Charlie; CD (1998)
$35.00
Japanese, Japanoise, Grind, Psych, Experimental, Noise; CD – Ex Used condition
Melt-Banana have absolutely no time for attention spans and neither do I. Their music is at once an entity unto itself and bizarrely essential to music as a whole, likely because there has always been an unspoken demand for hysterically overenergetic ultra-distorted music in the backs of minds of various hyperactive earth-dwelling consumers of music, none of whom have been completely satisfied by the earnestness and overbearing sincerity that runs through the majority of heavy music. Very few bands have it in their craft to be heavy and fun in mutual excess, yet Melt-Banana have made a prolific career out of it and are quite comfortably in their third decade as I type. They’ve always been an abundantly heavy band without any of the scornful misanthropy, politicised sharpness and/or meatheaded obnoxiousness that tends to come with the package. That said, Charlie is without a shadow of a doubt their most aggressive album. After the more scatterbrained, underproduced antics of their previous outings, the girls and boys of MxBx seemed to feel it was time to raise their game on this one; the production is arguably the finest of their whole career, the songs are developed into disarmingly coherent structures, the noise is kept up at absolute fucking maximum from start to finish, and (unusually) many of the songs are laden with an off-hand sense of brutality that adds a different flavour to their trademark goofiness.
