[ATTENDED: June 6, 2024] Melt-Banana
I’ve known about Melt-Banana for years. I knew they were loud and fast and were from Japan. But I didn’t know much beyond that. Turns out they’ve never had a permanent drummer. They like the freedom of a drum machine. For over twenty years they had a bass player (Rika Hamamoto) but when they decided to tour again recently, they decided to go just as as duo Yasuko Onuki – vocals and Ichiro Agata – guitars, effects.
I saw them nine months ago when they opened for Igorrr. I knew they toured a lot but I didn’t think they’d be back again as a headline act.
This show was really really packed and I was on the side of the stage so I didn’t really see all that much, but since there’s only two of them, it was actually not a bad place to stand.
The set wasn’t radically different from the last time I saw them. I wrote:
After getting all of their gear set up, Yasuko calmly stood with a colorful videogame controller looking device in her hand. A wall of amps and a laptop behind her. Off to her left a few feet was Ichiro, with a guitar, a huge array of pedals and his own wall of amps.
He played fast and he looped his sounds and did a million things most of which I can’t even fathom. Yasuko had her device and from time to time, she would wave her hand and presumably push a button on the gadget and the drums and bass blasted out of the speakers. And these drums sounded great–they sounded real and not like a preprogrammed device. I actually wondered if they were somehow triggering the drumset that was set up behind them (they weren’t).
Yasuko sings very high, very fast and sounds kind of angry. But she never looked angry. And she never broke a sweat (while Ichiro was a sweaty mess).
They played a whole bunch of songs, I can’t even imagine how anyone could tell them apart. But someone did, as the setlist below is from the NY show but I believe it is the same (or roughly so) of ours–comparing my clips to what the songs are, it seems like the setlist was the same each night.
I Just Read About That... 