Melt-Banana / The Perverts (live at The Exchange)

Bristol
25 October 2019

Well, we may have missed The Jesuits, but Bristol’s Perverts more than made up for any disappointment. The charismatic leader was decked out in a silver jumpsuit, Elvis musical staves stitched to his legs and noddy-eared headgear completing the look.

He danced the stage like a demented Tellytubby with this peculiar bent-knee jig as the music behind him jutted like a no-wave convention of post-punkery, a loosely bound cocktail tipping comical with the singer’s manic stare swaying towards disturbing.

It was as confusing as it was laughable, with a marshy subhuman-like vibe topped with a high-pitched squawk of vocals, they really rocked their poison perfectly, a pinch of naughtiness splashing on through too. At one point, the guitarist (whose blue wig under his yellow waterproof made him look like a Fisher Price Cthulhu) hit this horror vibe, plucking an awesome effect-saturated noir from his frets (why they haven’t a whole album of that I’m not sure, but they should). The singer handed out plastic bats to the audience, fingers bouncing with a few as he launched into a Hallowe’en-flavoured number quickly followed by one about “cocks”.

Honestly, this band were excellent, as the backing glided a gyrating gamble of Cardiacs wah and pinioned plunder, and that glorious redux of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” that crowned it all with a rosy cherry. A welcome antidote to all this Brexit bollocks, I’d recommend you get on down to their Bandcamp now and give them some of your hard-earned.

After piling in their own sound-system, I was worried there’d be little wiggle room for Melt-Banana’s usual antics, even if they’ve reduced themselves to a duo; but I needn’t have been worried as they fully exploited what little space they had left. Man, this was intense, the guitar swamped in this enormous grating noise, erupting in evil vortexed wah, the room’s small dimensions just enhancing the experience. YaKo flew around like a possessed samurai, zapping the audience with aural lasers from her press-button controller (a Numark Orbit, if Google is to be believed), curving out a cacophony of broken grittiness.

Love seeing DJ equipment in the right hands, don’t you, firing out my kinda dance music – splintering, sporadic, seriously off the leash. Her vocal interjections buried in the overt noisiness of those techno wormholes, words that kind of splattered randomly around as the surgeon-masked Agata skidded his guitar into a fizzled verve, scuttering Otomo Yoshihide-like in all that slamming goo, suddenly chiselling out his riffable claws or skating on retracted horizons.

Songs would start in a lustred haze, trembling like newborns before suddenly spurring headlong into hedonistic release. The sound was carved up on a powder-keg of intriguing shapes, a volatile joy of buckling beat and squealing contour that in an instant turned the floor into a collision of moshing bodies and grinning faces.

An absolute joy!

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-