MELT BANANA - Cell-Scape LP (colour vinyl)

Limited edition Metallic Red colour vinyl.

"No wave without the self-conscious pretension, avant garde composition compressed into one-minute-or-less bursts, urgency, intricate destruction, pure glorious abandon. Melt-Banana play the same way that Repulsion, Naked City, The Ruins, or The Boredoms all make you want to scream and dance and kill your neighbors. This is not music that we are conditioned to accept. This is you delirious with joy scraping your five senses off the floor." - Matthew Moyer, Ink19

What makes Cell-Scape work isn't just that it's a slightly more accessible version of the whole MxBx thing but also the fact that it's framed by a pair of psychedelic electronic instrumental pieces. It's a framing device of sorts, a gateway into the spiky madness of Melt-Banana and a time for reflection afterwards. As much as I like previous MxBx albums they all suffered to some extent from overloading your circuits, throwing out so many sharp short shocks of noise rock in such quick succession that it was difficult to process them as individual tracks before a new one was almost over; compounding that over a full 20+ track album and all but the stringest oamong us will be more exhausted than exhilarated. Cell-Scape is different, not only in that the tracks here are a bit longer and take time to fully develop instead of just getting in and out as quickly as possible but in actually giving you time to acclimate, time to process and time to unwind. I'm never going to return to "Phantasmogoria" on its own, but it's essential to the ecosystem of Cell-Scape in a way that makes it impossible to skip, and while "Outro for Cell-Scape" has a lot more going for it - it's essentially a full progressive electronic track that can stand on its own in that context - as a decompression period after 25 minutes of madness it really comes into its own.