w/ Racebannon & Vernal Pike
Tuesday, October 18
9 p.m.
$10
18+
With live staples that combine furious grindcore with frenetic spazz-punk and have titles like "Shield for Your Eyes, A Beast in the Well on Your Hand" and "Cat Brain Land," few would argue that the music Japanese trio Melt-Banana plays isn't weird.
Among those few, however, is frontwoman Yasuko Onuki.
"Actually our music is not weird music for me," she insisted in an email interview. "It is pretty normal and straight and it is what I want to listen to."
Fair enough. When you inhabit the headspace that it takes to produce an album like M-B's 2007 opus Bambi's Dilemma, perhaps your definition of normal becomes skewed.
It's that slightly askew view that makes Melt-Banana's music so compelling. In their reckless fusion of basically every genre under the sun, Onuki, guitarist Ichirou Agata and bassist Rika Hamamoto have gained legions of fans and just as many detractors. In the process, they managed to be lumped in with the ill-defined noise-punk genre with acts as disparate as Bloomington natives Racebannon and Songs About Fucking miscreants Big Black. Onuki just shrugs.
"I don't much care about genre and I think it is hard to categorize our music, and I don't think about genre when I make music," she said. "So it is up to listeners."
Her explanation of why Melt-Banana spends months at a time on the road with hardly any time to breathe between epic tours is similarly dismissive.
"I just do what I want to do," she said. "Playing music is what I want to do in my life, so it is easy for me to keep playing."
No one's complaining about that. Few bands today have the tireless road ethic that Melt-Banana boasts. Bloomington is just one of -- get this -- 51 cities with dates on the band's current North American tour.
The same effort that has kept Melt-Banana on the road for the better part of every year has kept them out of the studio, but Onuki promises the follow-up to Bambi's Dilemma is on its way.
"We were planning to put out a new album before this North America tour, but we could not finish it up in time," she said. "So maybe it will be out next year, around spring or summer."
In the meantime, the constant opportunities to witness the group's visceral live show will do just fine.
Post by Brad Sanders
