by Myles Tiessen (@myles_tiessen)
Let’s be honest. Punk bands don’t have a long life expectancy. There is an unspoken rule that the band should dissolve after a few years of good fun blasting out demo after demo. Fuse is the full-length debut from Nicfit, a Japanese punk band that has been together for over a decade. That’s right—a debut LP after over ten years of playing together.
Aside from the odd demo, compilation, and a split EP with M.A.Z.E., Nicfit has remained relatively quiet. Fuse proves the band’s lengthy origin story wasn’t from creative apathy or a lack of dedication, but rather the devilish dormancy— a group dedicated to ascendancy no matter the continuance. Nicfit crashes the gates with an ascending guitar riff and a sonic barrage of feedback on opener “Unleashed.” There is little getting in the way of lead singer Hiromi’s vicious delivery, aiding the primal tactility of the track. In fact, the entire LP is fitted with raw production that gels nicely with the no wave bones of the album.
Nicfit has an old-school approach to punk. That’s certainly not a pejorative; the straightforward songcraft is both catchy and edgy. Most tracks feature earworm riffs but are so damn distorted that the end product is nothing less than classic rip-shit punk. All said and done, It feels like the most hardcore post-punk you will ever hear.
“Boundary,” the best track on Fuse, is a brilliant display of Nicfit’s ability to capture the fluidity of punk. The song revs up with a toxic amount of feedback so terrifying it sounds like a guitar falling in a vat of acid. The drums propel the music to a neck-breaking speed, as the bass and lead guitar tag-team a surf-rock riff that would be at home in a Pebbles compilation. These subtle explorations of rocks soundscapes turn Nicfit from just another punk band to masters of the genre.
The album comes to a close with a dynamic cover of The Urinals “Ack Ack Ack.” Like the Southern Californian songwriters, Nicfit take a minimalist approach to the song but manages to fit impressionistic guitar licks between lyrics and race towards a soaring finale. It’s a great ending to an album so clearly inspired by the annals of punk.
The unrelenting sincere ferocity of Fuse is what makes it so listenable and compelling. It’s the perfect blend of equal parts muddled deformity of traditional punk rock and the experimentation that the globalization of the genre offers. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another ten years before another Nicfit album.