Review Summary: Hardcore punk from the pits of noise hell.
If you're familiar with Melt Banana, or the noise scene in general, you should know the extremely chaotic, disjointed style of the band. If not, then it is damn near indescribable to pin down the MxBx sound. Picture an Engrish frontwoman, shrieking at the top of her lungs, together with some jumpy basslines, and the most inhumane guitar licks you will probably ever hear, to coin together a fitting soundtrack for the end of the world as everyone knows it. And that's not even close to scraping the surface of their sound. On their debut album, "Speak Squeak Creak", Melt Banana create their own highly ***ed environment, full of mini-songs that would only be perfectly suitable for a universal catastrophe. But maybe that is what they were trying to get at all along...
As soon as you turn on the album, you are greeted with the highly unnerving opening of "Tail in Garbage", which is a great introduction to the chaos that you will soon be quite familiar with by the end of this album. Naturally, the whole album is quite second nature in that aspect, mainly due to the disturbingly high pitched theme of the album. On the other hand, it is quite an experience, as it takes you through the bare bowels of hardcore punk, and crosses ground on very dadaist noise rock, which makes for a pretty exciting experience. Not to mention, the guitarist Agata makes some of the most ***ed, yet beautiful, guitar riffs in the punk scene nowadays, and is known to distort the guitar lines to the point of being damn near incognito as a guitar at all, and most often comes across as a siren a lot of the times.
Really though, there's not much to discuss about Melt Banana, especially their album "Speak Squeak Creak", other then it really is an experience like no other, and features Melt Banana at possibly their most rawest era. The album is also extremely lo-fi, which adds to the mind-numbingly noisy tactics of the album. Needless to say, definitely not for the majority of rock fans. However, if you're into avant-garde, or like your punk abnormally noisy, or even appreciate highly original guitars coming after you at full velocity, then give the album a shot. A classic expedition in the noise circuit.
