Available on digipack CD and on LP with digital download.

Was absolutely shocked to realize that it's been more than six years since the last Melt Banana album; yeah, they released that Lite LIVE CD back in 2009 that featured the band doing a stripped down, guitarless version of a bunch of their songs off of their previous albums, but Fetch is the first actual studio album to come from the band since 2007's Bambi's Dilemma. Held up in part due to a combination of lineup changes that have pared the band down to the core duo of founding members Yasuko Onuki (vocals) and Agata (guitars, programming) and a period of self-reflection in the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, it seems that the band was also taking their time in crafting some of the most powerful music of their career, which Fetch certainly delivers. This long-running Japanese band sounds as ferocious as ever here, and the songs on this album make up some of the band's catchiest and craziest material ever, a near perfect fusion of the skronky No-Wave influenced progpop that they explored on the last album Bambi's Dilemma and the punishing cyborg grindcore of Cell-scape. It's another step in their ongoing evolution that has seen Melt Banana mutate with each new release, from their twitchy early noise rock mayhem to their present grindpop power.

The sound on Fetch is as huge and thunderous and intense as it ever was, the band's combination of Yasuko's yelping vocals and their sugarshock pop hooks and discordant blastcore is sculpted into frantic blasts of energy; each song is massively layered, filled with richly complex arrangements and stirring melodies that contrast brightly against the band's more dissonant and noisy moments. From the moment that the spiked blast-rock of opener "Candy Gun" screams out of the gates, Melt Banana begin to wrap their sound in glistening digital electronic textures and high-frequency signals that tap at the periphery of your hearing, moving fluidly into the following eleven anthems of complex progged-out blast. Agata's guitar-work has long been lauded as some of the most inventive in underground music, and his riffs and effects and textures on Fetch are utterly brilliant, especially the mutant thrash riffs that he blasts out of his instrument and the demented digital looplike quality of his riffs as they spin and circle wildly around the brutal blastbeats and pummeling, intricate patterns of the drum programming, seemingly synchronizing with the digital scrape of skipping CD players. It's some of the heaviest stuff they've done, rhythmically, with blastbeats galore and lots of thunderous double bass. The songs zip from frenetic assaults of spastically angular cyberpunk into furious futuristic hardcore to chrome-plated disco-metal, Yasuko delivering her weird Dadaist lyrics in that utterly charming, utterly maddening meth'd-out chirp of hers. And there's definitely something triumphant about the sound of this album, something that resonates on an emotional level in a way that previous Melt Banana records didn't, which makes this even more impressive; just listen to the song "Schemes Of The Tails" for proof, as it is one of the most poignant pieces of music I think I've ever heard from this twenty-year-old band, rivaled only by the brilliance of the closing song "Zero", as fine a piece of fractured catchiness as Melt Banana has ever crafted, a pounding, ecstatic earworm of angular majestic pop-punk that will no doubt linger in your head long after the album ends...