Review Summary: ...5 more minutes of death music noise please, broken sex robot
Part #306 of pushing things you may not have the slightest good reason to tune into:
noisecore. Chaos, noise, lo-fi, harshness, vitriol, absurdity, pain. It's the noise rock imagined by people who have yet to realise that noise rock is just rock with a little more gain, a little less melody. No soft touches here - noisecore fucking hates you, and if not, odds are it hates itself enough to make its endgame incensing you into murdering it. Those rampaging death-instincts have stylistic implications too: other than their obvious abrasion, noisecore's structural framework and methodology are too unpredictable for a proper archetype, just one reason for the difficulty of pinning down a stable canon from the genre's shadow army of underground nobodies and oddball notoriety milestones (a quick search for 'big names' will quickly bring you into the company of The Gerogerigegege, The Locust and Melt-Banana's early masterpiece
Charlie).
Now, Moreru have been on the verge of graduating from the former to the latter for a few years now, practically perfecting noisecore on 2019's
itsunohinikabokunokotowoomoidasugaii そして…… (in one breath, you filthy animal). That record, though conventional in its lo-fi hardcore setup, was a force to be reckoned with, every screamo trope blasted at a wavelength near unintelligible outside the essential qualities of its pain and rage. Moreru's work since has largely sought to lock auxiliary styles into their perverted matrix: 2020's
粛 粛 EP successively teased and trampled over a more melodic approach, its opener laced with a deceptively friendly indie pop chorus, while last year's
Yamada Hanako opened the door to trap, of all things (trapdoor!), the result fascinating in its scope yet nauseatingly dense in execution. It teased possibilities that largely ended up choked (trapped!), but these find fresh voice on the band's latest EP
l0V3L3$$R0BxT. This is both the much succinct and fully realised instalment in their current chapter - five minutes, three tracks, no nonsense. In we go: the opener goes full J-pop for 70 impossible seconds, lo-fi punctuations and harsh backing vocals slipping between foreground and background like a fever dream; the second track is proper head-inside-a-microwave bullshit, one of Moreru's most outwardly unhinged songs to date yet deceptively composed in its clownish delivery and versatile range of abrasive devices; the third, final and shortest track is one of
those songs that can only be received as fantastically amazing or irredeemably terrible and forces you to make a choice within the first few heartbeats. Rampaging tremolo leads, singalong, airhorns, autotune, blast beats, static, feedback, breakdowns, entire disintegrating rainbows of lurid morbid skin-blotting candyshit and an obligatory volley of larynx-rending screams. I count at least three separate generations of emo ineptitude resurrected and brutally assassinated over the course of one blistering minute. It's perverted, silly, punishing, inspiring. That's Moreru in a nutshell - more than anything else they've done to date,
l0V3L3$$R0BxT shines equal parts as an uncompromising mission statement and a disorientingly accessible snapshot of a sound that, in any other hands, would surely have no hope of working in the slightest. It will tarnish your day like stranger's spit in an expensive milkshake and you must hear it immediately.
