2 is not an easy album to withstand. I wouldn't be surprised if most people hated this album. In fact, I'd expect it. The rules that most sane-men follow when playing music (verses, choruses, the occasional solo/instrumental) are ignored in this album. So are all the standards of music we naturally have imposed on the concept and workings of music itself. Hanatarash tries to defy the very notion that this might even be music. And at first listen, I would say that they succeeded. But strangely, by the time I finished 2's second track, nonsensically-titled "we bite bollocks" (all lowercase), I realized that 2 is indeed music, because it provokes in a similar, yet different way, as "normal" music.
Music is able to instill us with all sorts of beautiful and twisted thoughts and emotions. it can relax us and make us feel energized and/or happy. It can make us contemplate about ourselves and life itself. Music is like a drug, as in it can manipulate and expand our minds to new creative highs or lows. Hanatarash does the same thing. The songs on this album give you the feeling of peaking on a handful of Amphetamines. I get an uneasy feeling, like I need to get up or something. My pulse literally quickens a little and I sense a little paranoia, if you could call it that. From second to second, the songs completely switch gears on you, going from piano-playing to crashing metal, or from the grind of a buzzsaw to jangling chimes and beeps. When you're listening, you're always on-edge, uncomfortably anticipating the next random switch-up, as if you're enduring Chinese water-torture and waiting for that next horrible drop of water.
The point is, Hanatarash has created Music, whether they wanted to or not. And that's what makes this album so amazing. It does to you what other forms of music can do, but because its under an artful facade of crashes, whirs, noises, beeps, screeches from the throat and the feedback, trashy strings and shattering glass, it doesn't appear so, and therefore, listening to it feels like an entirely new experience.
I couldn't blame you if you don't like it, though. It is weird to listen to music that bears absolutely no similarities to the boundaries that our minds have put on music. Over time, our brains have clearly defined what Music is, and what separates music from sounds and noises ("Sounds do not have structure, music does"). Hanatarash has now rendered this definition as an obsolete way to Listen. Everyday sounds and noises have always been known as unstructured and meaningless, but Hanatarash has done the impossible by provoking feelings and carefully orchestrating these noises. This band's work is a huge accomplishment for the evolution of Music, and humanity's perception of the medium, and what that medium exactly is. Unfortunately, it is so revolutionary, and so unfamiliar to us, that it is extremely alienating to most connoisseurs of music.
In short, 2 is utterly terrifying to the senses. It is chaos and insanity at light speed, and definitely NOT for the faint of heart.
Try starting out with we bite bollocks, my dad is car, pisshole surfers, and vortex shit.
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