MELT-BANANA, THE BLIND SURGEONS OPERATION and SCHIZOID at Lees Palace, Sunday, May 17. Rating: NNN
Despite Melt-Banana being a band whose music is always mutating, short-circuiting, left-turning and genre-defying, their audience seemed to know exactly what it wanted and exactly what it was going to get at Lees Palace. Fair enough: the Tokyo noise punks’ reliance on triggered samples dont give them a lot of room to go off script, and their ambitious touring regimen brings them to Toronto on the regular.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the crowd wore a collective mask of detachment and reserve during the openers’ sets, either calmly meditating on the music or stoically exhibiting patience before the part of the night they’d paid to see. It was in strange contrast to the musicians roiling furiously onstage first electro-scuzz punks Schizoid, who sounded like several games of Missile Command being played at once, and then dark metal bros the Blind Surgeons Operation, billing themselves (falsely) as “the worst band in Ontario.” The crowd conserved its energy, and the house PA was worrisomely low in volume and dull in tone.
When Melt-Banana took the stage in front of a wall of speaker cabinets, it was like someone hit a switch. Laser lights drizzled colour over billowing smoke, the room throbbed with pulsing backing tracks, and Agatas guitar pealed off the walls. An intense but friendly-seeming mosh pit churned while singer Yako wielded a MIDI controller like a neon-lit war hammer, smashing and tomahawking the air to unleash waves of blast-beat samples.
Roars of applause greeted them at every break in the set, and foot-stomping chants of We want more! were in effect within seconds of their closing blowout. When the band came back for a one-song encore, the stage-divers and crowd-surfers started queuing up for their last ride of the night, knocking out Agatas guitar for a good chunk of the song in the process. It was an evening of world-class noise-punk weirdness that went off like clockwork.
music@nowtoronto.com | @Streetsbag
