Gig review: Melt-Banana at The Crescent, York

Like many of us, they’ve had to have some parts cybernetically replaced since the 1990s, with technology now filling in for bass and drums and bringing a new dimension of electronic sounds into their intense hardcore attack. In DIY punk style, Onuki and Agata man the merch stall pre-gig and take a steady stream of selfies with fans, while support bands Mumbles and Cowtown do a great job warming up the crowd, before the duo take to the stage to assemble their arsenal of amps, pedals and laptops.

A barrage of programmed drums swiftly accelerates to machine-gun grindcore tempos and the moshpit erupts. Onuki’s high-pitched vocal yelps and chants bring a very different kind of energy to the guttural growls that usually typify music this intense. but live she is a commanding and charismatic presence, brandishing an illuminated control panel in one hand to direct the sonic chaos, while Agata wrangles brutal riffs and squealing, octave-shifting noise out of his Gibson SG.

The enthusiastic mixed audience of punks, metalheads, goths, geeks and beardy gig-dads (like your correspondent) is exactly the kind of crowd you win by resolutely ploughing your own furrow for decades. Perhaps some of the serious devotees throwing themselves around at the front may recognise every song – there’s a fair few tracks from Fetch and a mid-set burst of micro-songs whose duration is measured in seconds, in the vein of their sometime tour buddies Napalm Death. But this is very much a band to experience live, up close and in the moment, a glorious blur of sound and energy, a band who may be veterans but who give no quarter to nostalgia, always pushing forwards. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the room without a mile-wide grin on their face.