Review Summary: kill emo.
Quick Guide to Non-Casual Music Consumption
“Mum.”
Yes.
“Mum, I think I have feelings.”
Yes you do. They are real.
“Mum, please validate my feelings.”
I do not understand them. Listen to music.
“Mum, my feelings hurt.”
Listen to painful music. It is emo.
“Mum, I don’t give a fuck about this man’s feelings. He is self-obsessed and boring. I care only about my feelings, which hurt now more than ever.”
Listen to your therapist.
“I neither want to understand nor be understood by other people.”
Listen to your father.
“All I want is for my pain to be momentarily expunged by a vast stimulus perfectly tailored to my twin needs for explosive catharsis and bottomless dissociation. I want this enough to sacrifice anything.”
Listen to Japanese noisecore.
itsunohinikabokunokotowoomoidasugaii そして…… (2019)
Moreru play lofi noisecore/screamo and they sound like hell. Listen to them and/or regret it. Their hellishness is immediately apparent on their sole full-length album
itsunohinika…, from the very first word in the very first second: “Moreru”. The name of the band: an affirmation. The band immediately state their claim as the creators of this piece and so, from the word go, we have a narrator. They are here; we are being addressed; praise be. This is all a little emo for my liking - but wait! By the
second second, this perspective is completely overwritten by a searing wall of harsh fucking noise that tears up any pretence of authorial stability, opting for a far more entertaining pretence of authorial self-erasure, or dare I say collateral destruction; the track’s title “Bokusatsu” translates as
beat to death, but it’s somewhat unclear which party being entreted with death. Does this matter? It sure as shit is a beatdown; who’s to split hairs over first, second and third persons? “Bokusatsu” comes off as the bitterest of muck-munching empty death-grin jokes for all of its forty-one precious seconds; hardly the most inviting of opening statements, but you can bet every last shred of your self-esteem that it’s seen off with it the right conviction. The album has started.
Said conviction goes a long way, and it’s frankly remarkable how much shit Moreru get away with on this record, even if they park their harsh noise antics after the opener. Predictably enough
itsunohinika… is violent as all hell, but it’s most notable for its brutal haymakers. If those opening two seconds are representative of anything, it’s the way the band’s mean-spirited songwriting pulls the rug from under wherever their audience were planning to put their paws in maybe two or three paces’ time. Shock of all horrors, this happens a lot, whether it’s “Watashi wa Kanashii Onnanoko Desuka”’s descent midway into a syncopated mockery of a ‘clean’ bridge, “Otaku Minagoroshi”’s unnervingly catchy opening lick, or “Zegen”’s
surprise motherfucker grind outro that literally none of you were ever gonna ask for. You love it. The album continually finds fresh ways to sound ugly as shit; rather than falling back on the grit of their hideous production value or the intensity of their disposition for going full-throttle, Moreru are never afraid to ride a hairpin the moment things are starting to fester. By the time the sluggishness of closer “Kanjou no Machi” starts to wear a little thin, it’ll come as no surprise that the band switch gears to kick the album to pieces in perhaps the most cataclysmic meltdown of all. Power to them; can’t say I’d know what to do with half that much rage and disgust.
On the topic of hideousness, that production really is nasty and the band don’t wear it for gratuity. Their dry tones are well suited to their jagged performances, splintering under each note in a way that carries a vicious air of unsustainability. Match this with the brickwalled lofi hell that courses through the whole passage, and you’ve got an agorophobic’s sticky morning in the making. The band’s tone and mix are showcased to their best on “Soshite, Seieki” and “Kumamoto”, coincidentally the two most traditional screamo tracks here. The former is evocative of Circle Takes the Square at their most possessed, while the latter recalls the slowest cuts on Orchid’s ever-hailed self-titled album. These songs are also more dedicated than anything else to conserving momentum, requiring the band to buy into their tones and aesthetic wholesale instead of weaponising them for shock value as on earlier parts of the tracklist. “Soshite, Seieki” fares especially well here, scoring an unexpected moment of beauty a minute and a half in as the guitar and drums drop out of the arrangement and a swollen, horrifyingly compressed bass drone takes centre stage. The other instruments pick things back up in short order, but the track’s relatively considerate pacing affords us an opportunity to savour their chemistry. The fuzziest qualities of their sound are a vehicle for interplay and respite here rather than pure abrasion; the band are clearly in their element, and their stylistic choices find themselves vindicated.
Cute talk of occasional instrumental interplay aside, I was honestly a little surprised to learn Moreru is a three-piece band and not a particularly ratty solo project. Their manic approach to songwriting and everything-at-once mix, each member amplified and asphyxiated in equal measure, correspond neatly to the standard tells for a dyed-in-the-wool bedroom project; imagine Parannoul several hundred rungs further up the ladder of despair. Maybe this is silly; is the number of band members really relevant to their scope for huge volumes, volatile writing or unhinged desolation? Perhaps not, but this impression
is certainly testament to the album’s emotional intensity; if it’s easy to imagine a piece as the output of a singly myopically tormented multiinstrumentalist soul into a long-suffering DAW, you can be sure it wears its heart on its sleeve and flashes an endearing brand of bullishness over the mixing board. Some might even call it intimate, accurately so for that is what it is! The lyrics confirm as much, but you should make no attempt to translate them because that shit is fucked up.
What does that leave us with? Not so much; this is a raging burnout, not a silly legacy piece.
itsunohinika… rips. It will stun you and disgust you and make you reluctant to listen to anything (or just wish that you’d never heard it). It’s clear on the kind of impression it shoots for, and it’s hard to fault the band for the way they see it through. They are focused and distinctive in their every move: the album’s Bandcamp summary simply reads
kill emo., and now that Moreru have made their case, I can’t help but agree.
P.S. Easter Eva otaku egg
Amongst other spangled laptopjank, the album artwork contains a subtitled still from the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series, used as a desktop background but afforded prominence within the artwork image. Perhaps it was the laptop owner/band member’s background by coincidence; perhaps it is a visual metaphor suggesting that, just as the album’s production and pacing is chaotic, so too is the layering of images within images chaotic. Who’s to say?
The still in question has its own significance, taken from a point in Episode 6 at which pilot Rei Ayanami (pictured) promises the protagonist Shinji Ikari that she will protect him from harm (subtitled). True to her word, Rei does save Shinji’s life a few minutes later by placing herself between him and a line of oncoming hostile fire, but the personal investment implied by her promise is false.
The show initially sets Rei up as Shinji’s romantic interest, skewing the subtitle lines towards a touching expression of individual concern and self-sacrifice. However, as future episodes unfold it becomes clear that Rei’s cool demeanour and insular lifestyle stem from a vast lack of self-worth, which is only gradually remedied throughout the series and rarely a point of particular focus. Her willingness to risk her life for Shinji’s likely stems more from an orders-are-orders mindlessness than any personal concern for him; even if you do read this into her motivations, she still views herself as expendable at this point in the series to the degree that her selfless actions are exactly that, in the hollowest sense.
Self-sacrifice comes cheap for people who treat themselves like dirt; this is an almost bemusingly indirect way to hint at feelings of depression and worthlessness on an album that spades manic dysphoria onto every one of its outward-facing surfaces, but a little subtext goes a long way. For further insight, please disregard my earlier advice and browse the lyrics of “Watashi Kanashii Onnanokodesuka”, which scholars among you will have correctly recognised as Japanese for
am I a sadgirl? Much like Eva, they are deeply unhappy and ugly and melodramatic and largely indecipherable and disconcertingly beautiful in spite of everything, but, perhaps, with that all-important razor-keen conviction of delivery behind them, they are enough. No-one enjoys feeling like shit, but it’s good of Moreru to have made the best of it. God bless.
