ノイズの若大将 may be the most shocking grindcore album I've ever come across. I'm serious. Not shocking in a vulgar sense though. There are plenty of those. Instead, the band is doing something to my brain that I have never witnessed a dyed in the gore grind operation do before. They are tackling banal subject matter without a hint of irony- and it's really working for them.
The long suffered scourge of Japanese grindcore band Final Exit dates back to 1994, surviving most of that time as a two-man sonic slaughterhouse. They released their twenty-fifth album last year, titled ノイズの若大将 , or Young Guy of Noize in English. I don't read Japanese, so I needed to have it translated for me. But once I Googled their full name It became very apparent what they were going for- this album is an earnest tribute to a series of teen films from the '60s and '70s known as the Wakadaishō series, or Young Ace or Young Guy in English. I've heard of tribute albums before, but this is probably one of the more conceptually challenging ones. Light teen romps shouldn't make for good subject matter for a grindcore album. Thankfully, no one told this to Final Exit. And if they did, they were ignored.
The Wakadaishō series, which stared Yūzō Kayama as the "Young Guy," was wildly popular in Japan at one point. You can think of the series as akin to those old Elvis beach party films, where the protagonist is a well-healed and intentioned meaning but salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, who has to rise to the occasion when confronted by an ill-tempered and often litigious villain, in order to win the heart of the film's female lead.
These contests for the clasp and affection of Yūzō's true love usually took the form of a sports competition. However, there is one film (Ereki no Wakadaishō) where Yūzō had to learn to play the guitar to woo the girl (something that he did in real life, as well as the film), and it ended up rocketing him into a very successful music career with his backing band, literally called, The Launchers.
There are winks and nods to Wakadaishō patterned throughout Young Guy of Noize, mostly in the form of straight-face, surf-rock interludes and bookends, but also a cover of The Launchers' "Black Sand Beach," which feels like it gliding in from a luau two houses over. You can almost smell the pineapple on the grill as its warbling riffs drift beneath your nose, and the crash of the waves on the beach as it bustles between your ears. On the grindery side of things, songs like "Some "Waka" songs #1)" do a remarkably palatable job of thinly layering sunny, strolling guitar lines with gummy wads of gnashing blast parts, and the complex interchange of the stop-start structures and momentum building melodies of tracks like "Running Donkey" are charmingly reminiscent of such technically proficient, and similarly anarchic, output of enigmatic groups like Clown Core. Think of the Ventures in a meth lab fire or Repulsion tooling around with their instruments and feeling the vibe on a deck of a soon to be shipwrecked cruise liner, and you'll be in the right headspace when diving into this album,
As I said, it's kind of shocking how earnestly Final Exit undertakes the subject matter of the album and how thoroughly they integrate the themes of the source material into their joyful, irreverent, pleasantly repugnant approach. Shocking, I would say, but not disappointing. This record gets my highest recommendation!
