So, Melt Banana, what are you going to do now that you've released two of your catchiest, most accessible albums of hyper charged futuristic grindpop (Cell-Scape and Bambi's Dilemma), have gotten props on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and recorded a song for the cartoon Perfect Hair Forever, and were recently chosen as the support on tours with both Tool and Lou Reed? What? Release the most out-there album in your career, with what is without question the noisiest music you guys have ever recorded? What the hell - Melt Banana has always taken a kind of perverse glee in subverting expectations for their music, just look at how poppy the band's music became earlier this decade after releasing a string of albums of low-fi skronk thrash on Skin Graft. The Japanese math/grind/pop legends have re-emerged after almost two years of studio silence with this new full length called Lite Live, and if you remember the tracks on the last album that were really heavy on the Theremin and dug those, then you're going to love this disc. All twelve of the songs were recorded live in Japan earlier in 2009, and feature a modified lineup of the band that has Agata removing his guitar completely and replacing it with pure electronic chaos, using a mixture of synths and Theremin to blast out violent clusters of starship laser sounds, swirling cosmic ambience, and crazy bleeping squelchy computer meltdown noise. Most of the songs on the disc had previously appeared on the Bambi's Dilemma album, but they are almost unrecognizable here, the framework of pounding angular bass and pummeling drums and Yasuko's chirpy vocals now wound around ultra chaotic noise and wildly oscillating waveforms. It's unmistakably Melt Banana, but their sound has gone totally apeshit, like hearing them jam with Bastard Noise with the freak-noise boxes cranked to the max. And a couple of tracks like "In Store" and "Humming Jackalope" have furious, seemingly improvisational drumming that goes so ballistic, crashing into massive washes of cosmic synth noise and crushing electronics, that it sounds almost like Japanese space-noise masters C.C.C.C. backed by the rhythm section from Last Exit. It's one of the craziest Melt Banana performances I've heard, definitely a far-out and abstract version of the band, but it fucking rules, too. And you'd hardly guess that this is a live set, the sound is HUGE, the drums are MASSIVE, it sounds to me like a studio album, certainly has a super thick studio-grade production. This electronics-centric version of their music is apparently a new thing that they've been performing with live recently, and their US tour going on right now (Nov '09) has them performing a big chunk of their material in this manner. Might not be the best place for newbie�s to Melt Banana to start off with, but longtime fans of the band are definitely going to want to hear this. Packaged in a six-panel digipack.