No. 39: Melt Banana Throws A Beach Party
But the song at No. 39 sounds like it made the surfer boys and surfer girls wish they’d brought some earplugs.
Over ten years and a bazillion records, super-screechy Japanese hardcore unit Melt Banana has slowly turned from releasing split singles with power violence bands to becoming a group that you can call “poppy” without getting weird looks. And so 2003’s Cell-Scape, this year’s Bambi’s Dillemma, and one-off singles like 2005’s awesome “Sweeper” have added some sugar (in the form of hooks and bridges and choruses) to the band’s blast beats and singularly strangulated six strings. Riffing on the surf guitar that you could hear in their music even before they first turned the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” into splatterbeat noise, “Blank Page Of The Blind” features the solo of the year from Ichirou Agata, an acidic tidal wave of wah-wah. Skip ahead to about four minutes in on the YouTube clip above to hear the band rip through “Blank Page” live, or check out a more high-fidelity version on their MySpace page, ’cause as noisy as it is, that solo really deserves to be heard without a blanket of digital camera distortion over it.
