Hayaino Daisuki – The Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell, or Did You Mean Hawaii Daisuki?

Although this band is hipster fodder because everything they do is ironic, and it’s out-of-the-closet postmodern in that method of finding narratives in randomness that has been trendy since Joyce, I find it excusable because their music resembles the ranting of an abused child. No, in a good — well, maybe not good but a mixed bag — maybe in a way that’s half good and half horrible.

I don’t want to listen to it again because it’s screeching and annoying, but I think it valid as music and art, and you shouldn’t care what I think, anyway. The really good record reviewer is not a personality engine but as close to transparent as you can get, by using their own personality as an obvious, visible, repetitive filter and thus one you can Photoshop out of your mind to get the gist of what you want to see in each record.

But back to the record: on the surface this is blister speed grindcore with some of the comic circus of random influences that made bands like Mr Bungle and Fantomas so annoying, but here it’s moderate. Most of this is straight ahead grindcore, or I should say, in grindcore format. Underneath it are nursery rhymes and children’s songs, in this case hidden (think steganography) within the fertile ground of 1980s sentimental metal like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest or Queensryche. Except here, they’re played at sixty times the speed.

That speed ruins drumming as an instrument, and backgrounds bass most of the time, and reduces vocals to a timekeeper with some nuance, which lets the guitars sing. And the guitars are singing a song of a child alone who has maybe thirty minutes a day when he listens to Iron Maiden and dreams of being on stage, or maybe of being a powerslave in Ancient Egypt or being a WWII flying ace. Escapism collides with an unyielding, high intensity, too-fast-to-be-anything-but oblivious reality here.

The riffs are good, by the way, like what a creative child might do; they’re cut from archetypes you recognize, mostly NWOBHM and speed metal, but with enough of their own interpretation to be quality. They fit together. Songs masquerade as chromatic blasting chaos but underneath a melody sneaks out, like a fantasy you dare not name.

And as your civilization crumbles, as you go off today to another boring job and to spend time with insincere frenemies and business associates who wouldn’t dust you off if you died, through streets of glowing neon hawking products for morons, you should think: is humanity the kicked child? How would its inner voice of clarity gain retribution, or breathing space, as the world presses on ever faster because it’s in denial and never wants to slow down and face the obvious.

The kind of thing a child would see, a kicked child maybe. Maybe it’s irrelevant in this case that hipsters like this band to be ironic; a big part of me thinks the joke is on them and big, ugly and mean in a way they will never understand. I hope they play more of this on the radio because it throws back at our time exactly the kind of crap it throws at us every day, except someone snuck in a counter-virus, and this one is the hope of a youngster for the moments of beauty and clarity found in the stadium heavy metal of years past.