Merzbow - Pulse Demon
Genres: Harsh Noise
I got kicked right into Merzbow right after I found out that a critically-polarized album of his, Pulse Demon, just so happened to be twice as popular as any of his second most popular album, Venereology, which had much better reviews. Seriously, it's the weirdest thing, considering that he's a harsh noise artist, and he had an album reaching nearly 10000 reviews on RYM. So asking the reddit, I found that Pulse Demon was popular online for meme usage, notably pertaining to inaccessible albums. So I checked out several Merzbow albums beforehand; some were great, some were boring. Now where does his most famous album fit into all of this?
I expected the album to be largely made up of pretty standard Merzbow, and the first two tracks were no surprise. It was pretty clear that in most instances, I would NOT be getting the imaginitive prowess of greats like the totally psychedelic Electric Salad. I was in for 75 minutes of the norm. Well, thankfully, some creativity made minor appearances in the next two tracks, and then came the first eleven-minute epic, Ultra Marine Blues, and there were plenty of great ideas scattered around that would make brilliant tracks on their own or combined with another. It starts out highly psychedelic, and sometimes it sounds drowned in water, but it can instantly turn sporadic like a zealot screaming about an apocalypse and convulsing on the stairs at City Hall. Unfortunately, all these ideas had about twenty seconds of album time, which means all these great ideas got no development. That's real kick in the swimsuit section.
The sixth track and the second eleven-minute epic, Tokyo Times Ten, started out with a few minutes of a great industrial beat that gave it a much more unique and even urban feel, but most of it returns to standard Merzbow behavior pretty quickly, which means the album was mostly thrown together for the most part. And the album ended the same way with one more track, only at six minutes. So at the end of the day, my predictions were mostly correct this time. This album doesn't really deserve to be so popular just because of a meme.
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