My Way My Love

Japanese noise punk outfit My Way My Love has somehow, until now, completely stayed under my radar. A shame, too, because Hypnotic Suggestion:01 absolutely rips.

With jagged, angular riffs, bleeps, blips, samples, and a good dose of melody, this album fuses so many things together that it’s hard to really keep track of where the album’s been, and where it might be going. It keeps things fresh, and it keeps the listener on their toes at all times, no matter how reserved a specific song may sound.

“A Girlfriend” starts the album in a freak storm of bleeps and glitches that really amount to nothing at all but a swirl of noise, until the vocals kick in with the next song, “Super Fresh!” Yukio Murata’s incomprehensible wailing fits right in with the siren-like guitar work and the continued swirl of blips. There’s really no uniform sound to the album, more a loose collection of sections that make up a specific song. Everything is just thrown in one giant blender and strewn about; rarely is there any semblance of continuity, save the album's longest track, “Captain,” which relies predominantly on some thick guitar and slow, methodical drum fills. The solid post-punk feel of the track is just what the album needed, some cohesiveness. Now I know it’s essentially a noise album, but it needs to pull together a bit more, and have more of a uniform sound.

That said, there are still some really great songs that depend primarily on noise to fuel their attack.

“Sports” is an extremely hypnotic track relying mainly on a thick bass groove and some extremely ominous electronic moments, ending with some frantic sounding vocal samples and what sounds like somebody drumming on an empty oil drum. Nothing else on the album ever really touches “Sports” or “Captain,” but there are some great grooves and even better free-form freakouts, but the album as a whole lacks a definite direction.

Great musicians, but they’ll need to improve their overall song compositions to really make an impact in the noise punk world.