Melt-Banana at Fine Line, Minneapolis (30 May 2024)

Japanese duo Melt-Banana brought a very unique lineup on their latest tour, in support of their forthcoming album 3+5.
The Fine Line show featured a very diverse lineup, featuring everything from shoegazing to noise to no wave to experimental to instrumental to punk. You don’t find this kind of weird musical genre in many shows.



Opening up the show, on this quadruple rock show was Baltimore’s Tomato Flower (Mike Alfieri, Ruby Mars, Jamison Murphy, Austyn Wohlers), playing a dreamy psychedelia set.



Vocal duties were shared between Jamison Murphy and Ruby Mars. Murphy described how he met Ruby and Austyn Wohlers, at a summer camp in Georgia, where they were studying English, but with an audio engineering minor. They all got along very well, and soon enough met Mike Alfieri at an experimental music festival called High Zero… and the rest is history.



The band released two EPs (Construction and Gold Arc) in 2022, and their debut album No came out in March 2024. Songs on their set were mostly from No, including the title track.


New demo song “Boudica” was also included. They were really excited about this new song, because it’s one of “the longer songs” and it’s a challenge for them to pull off.

babybaby_explores (31 May 2023)

Next was Rhode Island’s babybaby_explores, who we previously saw with Japan’s Buffalo Daughter in May 2023 and described them as: “babybaby_explores, an odd low-tech trio (Lids B-day, Sam M-H, and Gabe C-D). Lids does most of the singing and funky dance moves, while Sam in the hat, plays electric guitar, and rounding out Gabe on the drum machine. Not really sure if you can classify the band’s music… let’s just say they’re quirky. Their music doesn’t flow how you would expect and often it makes an abrupt left turn, but you just go with it.”



Since the last time we saw them, they’re still strange and Lids has even funkier dance moves. What’s new is that Gabe has been replaced with Ramona Cano-Daly, and they have a new release called Hair. I think the year that they spent on the road really helped them with their performance, Lids encouraging the audience to participate (with good response) and they seem really comfortable on stage.



Unfortunately, in the middle of their set, they had a dead mic and they spent a few minutes trying to figure it out. Eventually, they were given another live mic and the show continued. They were going to drop their last song on their set, due to running out of time because of the dead mic… but the audience demanded them to play it – so they played their last song “really fast”.



New York (by the way of Chicago)’s The Flying Luttenbachers said they’ve been around since 1991, but they sure don’t show their age. The “spectral warriors” were all instrumental and I would describe them as a little metal-jazz (if that’s a thing) and a little punk.



As you can see from their setlist, they only played six songs… but each song is very long and they easily just killed their 45-min set in a blink of an eye. Almost all the songs were from their latest album Spectral Warrior Mythos 2, which came out Summer 2024 via GOD Records, Austria.



The new album was described as an uneasy transitional album, since the original guitarist, Weasel Walter, relocated to Chicago and reformed The Flying Luttenbachers. The new band features Charlie Werber (from Lovely Little Girls and Guzzlemug) and “Wildman” Luke Polipnick (of Abhorrent Expanse).



Finally, Japanese noise artists Melt-Banana closed out the show.
Since forming in 1991 (originally called Mizu, but the name was changed to Melt-Banana a year later), the band came to fame when they were offered a record deal on KK Null’s record label.


By 1996, Melt-Banana found themselves touring Europe, and John Peel became a massive fan and asked them to record a Peel Session in 1999. Peel described the band as “Simply one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever seen and ever heard.”

Melt-Banana (25 Nov 2000)

Melt-Banana (23 Oct 2013)

It was in Nov 2000, when we first saw the band, as four-piece “proper band”… but since 2013, the band dropped their bassist and drummer. When we saw them in 2013, at Triple Rock, we wrote, “Currently the live band only consists of singer/programmer Yasuko Onuki and guitarist Ichirou Agata. The rest of their music comes from a laptop full of drum samples and samples, a colorful programmed keypad that Yasuko uses throughout the show, and about five or six very large speakers and amps that they bring on tour with them. For just two people, they produced some of the loudest sound I’ve heard at live shows.”



Based on Melt-Banana’s Fine Line performance, I can tell you that their forthcoming 3+5 is very energetic and upbeat. The band seemed really excited to play their new songs.



Among their hour-long set, the band played a Devo cover “Uncontrollable Urge”, and a lengthy encore set, which seemed to have at least eight or nine songs.