Blonde Redhead - Music from the years of magical thinking

Blonde Redhead are certainly a rare bird in the American indie landscape of recent years. New Yorkers by adoption and attitude (the name pays homage to the no wave of Dna), from their early days in the style of Sonic Youth under the banner (not by chance) of Steve Shelley's Smell Like Records, they have been protagonists of a musical journey that saw them, in the second half of the Nineties, write important chapters of noise-rock for Touch And Go, before veering towards an acidic pop under the aegis of 4AD.

The band was formed in 1993 as a quartet, with Kazu Makino (vocals and guitar), Amedeo Pace (vocals and guitar), Simone Pace (Amedeo's twin, drums) and Maki Takahashi (bass). But after their self-titled debut album, produced by Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Takahashi left the group, which continued as a trio, using bass only on their third album, Fake Can Be Just As Good from 1997, which marked the beginning of their marriage with Touch and Go.

Amedeo Pace and his twin brother Simone are Italian, but grew up in Canada before moving to the US, where they studied jazz in Boston. After graduating, they started playing in New York's underground clubs. It was there that they met Kazu Makino, a Japanese musician destined to become the band's future chanteuse: "We don't really know how a rock band is supposed to sound, maybe our approach is more primitive," the singer explains. "Our internal dynamics are strange, and maybe the fact that we're not American helps: we feel like we don't have a history we need to pay tribute to. We played a lot alongside punk bands, so we learned something from that way of playing, very direct, not very technically sophisticated." Their debut is marked by the singles "Amescream" and "Vague," distinctly experimental tracks, but still rather unpolished. Then came the self-titled 1994 mini-album, which earned the band solid critical acclaim, but also the label of being mere Sonic Youth copyists. Blonde Redhead's formula was refined on La Mia Vita Violenta, a hard, raw album dedicated to the Italian writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. But it's above all with 1997's Fake Can Be Just As Good that the trio reaches the peak of its chemistry. While still faithful to the song format, the trio ventures into bold avant-garde experimentation, employing dissonance, noise and eccentric effects, over which Makino's shrill falsetto hovers. So we move from the pure rock of "Kazuality" to the tribalism of "Symphony Of Treble" to the bleak psychodrama of "Ego Maniac Kid," which marks perhaps the record's climax.

An atmosphere of perpetual suspense, balanced between soft passages and jagged rock surges, also dominates In An Expression Of The Inexpressible (1998), which marks the beginning of the collaboration with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi. The shrill guitars of Makino and Amedeo Pace, and Simone Pace's crooked rhythms, build a vortex of tension, into which references to '60s soundtracks also creep in ("Luv Machine"), along with flashes of cocktail lounge ("Missile ++") and Western themes revisited in a progressive vein ("Futurism vs Passeism Part 2"). In short, the noise-rock foundation is worked through a series of tricks based mainly on dissonance and guitar riffs, as well as Makino's hysterical screams. A style that defies definition. "We're not no wave, nor avant-pop," the Japanese singer maintains. "Our music tends to reach a state of beauty and ecstasy. Starting from punk-rock, we trace sweet melodic lines that explode into bursts of violence. Both the music and the way I use my voice tend to emphasize our pursuit of beauty, without the barriers of genre." An all-encompassing pursuit, in short, as confirmed also by Kazu's tastes, which range from Pil to Lucio Battisti, whom she calls "a proto-punk singer."

But it's in 2000 that Blonde Redhead achieve their definitive consecration (in Italy too) with Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons. "It's a reference to our conception of melody," Kazu Makino explains. "In American slang, 'damaged lemons' means broken-down cars on the highway, cars stopped in a state of emergency. A bit like our melodies, which always seem to be broken down and in a state of emergency, with the urgency to be expressed and the awareness that at any moment they could break down again." The album softens the hallucinated fervor of their arrangements, without giving up experimentation, which focuses mainly on rhythm. "In Particular" is a little gem of post-modern funk, drawing on the tastiest pastiches of Stereolab, Cibo Matto and Pizzicato Five, while the mechanical rhythm of "This Is Not" echoes the breezy refrains of the Sixties. Through tracks like these, Blonde Redhead's harsh noise-rock softens, making room for acidic melodies, hyper-fast rhythms and more composed harmonies. And a ballad like "Hated Because Of Great Qualities" even echoes David Bowie's "Space Oddity." To those who accuse them of changing course, Makino has responded like this: "Our last two records are, for us, two sides of the same coin. It's not that we suddenly decided to change our music, it's just that this time we chose to rein in our natural tendency to explode into more dynamic, sometimes violent moments, in order to make our pursuit of beauty more evident. With Picciotto, on this record in particular, we worked a lot on my voice. Guy is very interested in singing and is someone who always knows how to encourage us in moments of difficulty." And once again, they were encouraged by the acclaim of the sharpest critics (as well as the audience) that greeted the record. To the point that even the Red Hot Chili Peppers took notice of them and wanted them as the opening act for the American dates of their recent tour. "The offer came from John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers' guitarist," Amedeo Pace recounts. "He knew us and wanted us to play with them. It was a very positive experience. There were incredible sound systems and a really powerful sound. It was like driving a very fast car. We were treated well. Especially considering that the crowds who go see them are pretty tough on opening bands: they'll throw anything on stage... But with us, they behaved themselves."

Misery Is A Butterfly (2004), their 4AD debut, marks the definitive shift toward the singer-songwriter form, taking shape as the natural continuation of the ideas explored on the previous record.

The remaining rough edges disappear entirely, in favor of a linear songwriting style resting mainly on vocal melodies and chord progressions; the whole thing is topped off by a production that makes Blonde Redhead's sound almost unrecognizable, veering nearly into easy listening.

It opens with the acoustic arpeggios of the single "Elephant Woman," with its steady rhythm punctuated by Afro percussion and an orchestral arrangement centered on strings, all accompanying a melancholy melody from Makino. Beneath the muffled sounds of "Messenger" we find a syncopated tempo à la "Bipolar" (from "Fake Can Be Just As Good"), with Amedeo Pace's nasal voice over a classic descending chord progression, which toward the end breaks into a simple vocal refrain; "Melody" follows more or less the same clichés, dominated by organ with a baritone guitar in the foreground.

Between the waltz of "Doll Is Mine" and the orchestral classicism of the title track (driven by a piano leitmotif, played by Kazu), we arrive at "Falling Man," one of the most interesting tracks, embellished with unpredictable piano flourishes. With "Anticipation" the scenery changes: dominant keyboards give rise to almost dream-pop atmospheres that could even bring to mind the Cure of the mid-'80s. "Maddening Cloud" seems like a rehash of "Melody Of Certain Three" from the previous album, with Beatles-esque choruses (!), wall-to-wall acoustic guitars and a mournful accordion in the background.

After the brief interlude of "Magic Mountain" (mellotron and voice, accompanied by evocative percussive touches), with "Pink Love," whose chord sequence has the flavor of an old soundtrack, we return to the compositional approach of the album's opening, though here the sound is harsher. "Equus" is a moment of recovery before the end, with bass and guitars of wave lineage, a finally more agitated rhythm and Kazu's characteristic geisha-like hiccups.

Blonde Redhead's butterfly, despite representing a brave choice, doesn't fully manage to take flight. The overall effect, unfortunately, is cloying and disorienting.

The following 23 marks the definitive marriage with pop. The title track, placed at the opening, really does seem lifted from a My Bloody Valentine record. The reverb flooding everything, the voice blending with all the rest, the dreamy melancholy Kazu gives herself over to. The steadiness of Amedeo Pace's drumming carries us through to what is the song most tied to their glorious past, without the roar of guitars, now arpeggiated, now still, namely "Dr. Strangeluv." Kazu's voice blurs among the reverbs and synth beds but guides the song divinely to its end. They used to call it shoegaze. What can we call it now? Simply pop. "The Dress" is measured and resigned like some compositions on Misery Is A Butterfly, "Sw" carries within it what we might call the most inexplicable passage on this album, namely a classical, baroque section that is, frankly, unlistenable.

After the encouraging start, the album loses ground over its length, whether because truly great songs are lacking, or because one senses a kind of indecision, perhaps due precisely to songwriting that is at times weak. There's even some overly easy electronics, and dreamy atmospheres that can either dazzle or bore, depending on taste. The ending redeems itself with "Top Ranking," amid synthesizers, drums that are now electronic, now human, and voices coming from every direction, and "My Impure Hair," a ballad for acoustic guitar and strings that could bring to mind the best of Mazzy Star.

23 isn't a bad record. It's simply the classic transitional album.

Indeed, the next stage in the New York band's ongoing transformation, Penny Sparkle, marks a kind of closing of the circle outlined across the previous three records, represented by the band's now-definitive settling into a liquid, ethereal electronic pop sound, clearly comparable to current reworkings of 1980s synth-(dark-)wave while also owing something to the dreamy modulations of the Cocteau Twins.

The New York band's further step in this direction is evident right from the location and producers chosen for this work, recorded under the care of Swedes Van Rivers and Subliminal Kid (Fever Ray) and, as Kazu herself has stated, partly influenced by the snowy, enchanted Stockholm in which she found herself, capturing sounds and sensations never so muffled before.

Indeed, while on the previous album reverbs and synthetic beds were still explicitly paired with guitars and, in any case, with tracks of punchy drive, on Penny Sparkle the keyboards not only become taller and rounder, but become the absolute protagonists of liquid pulses and luminous, dreamy settings. This is not, however, a merely nostalgic operation, but rather the natural outcome of the intersection between vintage fascinations and temporal dilations, which blend perfectly with Kazu's alluring melodies, ethereal and caressing as never before, now light years away from the furious yowling of their early days.

Memories of the past only echo in the pulse-and-rebound structure of "Oslo" and in the two tracks where guitar reverb becomes perceptible again — first worked, extended and purely functional to the atmosphere in "My Plants Are Dead", then back in the spotlight for a perfect syncretism of past and present in "Everything Is Wrong", a clear link to the residual drive of 23.

Having abandoned every form of expressive urgency, the record perhaps loses something in terms of immediacy, yet it brings to completion the turn Blonde Redhead have approached step by step over the years, now settling into the (definitive?) dimension of a refined, night-tinted electro-pop, dotted with dreamy echoes and measured eighties reworkings.

The sequel and endpoint of these uncertain works is Barragàn, yet another confirmation of the baroque phase, an album slyly and evenly split between soft pop, mainstream tracks and avant-garde attempts. Makino's personality calls the shots more than ever, while the two Pace brothers vanish into the artificial apparatus of the production (Drew Brown), and the result is faded and mawkish.

The first sub-album is the triumph of the blandness with which the band has tamed the noise-rock fans of their early days, turning them into demure lovers of pop, from inert techno built on irritating whispers ("Dripping", "Lady M"), to a 60s vintage sound that's somehow even flatter ("Cat On Tin Roof"), down to a sly imitation of Xx ("Penultimo").

The second virtually reinvents a mainstream career in a couple of songs. "The One I Love" is the album's only conventional song and its most atmospheric, even though its artificial nature is plain to see in the juxtaposition of production layers (arpeggios, electronic effects, treated vocals). "No More Honey" is its somewhat more "expressionist" twin, a kind of rough draft of My Bloody Valentine's "No More Sorry", a chiaroscuro that in the chorus turns up the distortion in a faint echo of the cacophony of their early albums. To these should be added the humbler lullaby of reverbed vocals and random noise that is "Seven Two".

The third "album" tries its hand at avant-garde and extended tracks, but the 8-odd minutes of "Mind To Be Had" are just an inept jam for electronic machinery and guitar. The brief suite "Defeatist Anthem" starts out built on analog keyboards, with Makino's voice sounding like a half-hearted intruder, before veering off into glitch messes and even pseudo-cosmic flourishes.

Over the years, the wait for new music from Kazu, Amedeo and Simone had become less an urgent need than a kind of open-ended hope. Not because we no longer needed them, but because it was clear the Blonde Redhead workshop had never stopped running. It was a matter of trusting them and letting them work. Discretion and reserve are something of a stylistic trademark for the three, in life as in art. Whether they're acting out wrestling moves like madmen on stage, or holding theater stages with restrained ease, what reigns among the three is New York's brisk dryness. A city and a state of mind.

In 2019, "Adult Baby", Kazu's successful solo project, had surfaced, hinting at independent developments, but also at a never-interrupted unity of purpose. On that record — incidentally one of Ryuichi Sakamoto's last public appearances — Amedeo Pace's guitars could in fact be heard on "Meo" and "Undo". Those two tracks can be seen as an early embryo of the band's current sound. Naturally, Barragán too, the last album before the long hiatus, stands as a precedent for the studied, dreamy grace of "Sit Down For Dinner". That record, however, was an ambitious, inconclusive work, more shifting in nature than indecisive, but still hard to follow all the way through.

The new album Sit Down For Dinner (2023), by contrast, comes across as cohesive both thematically and in its sonic choices. Its inspirational core draws on "The Year of Magical Thinking", the late American writer Joan Didion's superb elaboration of grief. One passage of the book reads: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." From these words springs the crystalline allure of "Sit Down For Dinner". In it, poetry of absence and memory intertwine with the prose of everyday life and vital impulse. It's worth listening to the album in search of continuity, rather than ruptures, between past and present. "We have our own language that has stayed the same," Kazu says, "we try to change rhythms, concepts and sounds. But the harmonic sensibility has remained the same. It hits the same part of the heart." The sonic, expressionist Blonde Redhead of the early albums is indeed a necessary premise for the impact of tracks like "I Thought You Should Know" or "Not For Me", while the second part of the title track turns the pensive caress of their 4AD period into a Cocteau Twins-like abstraction.

What stands out above all is the songwriting, which remains consistently strong throughout. The symbolist excess of the lyrics from the "Melody Of Uncertain Damaged Lemons" and "In An Expression Of The Inexpressible" era gives way — never so sharply focused elsewhere — to an introspective, reflective vein centered on life and its secrets, on humanity, on the truest and most elusive nature of feelings. A rediscovered age of innocence, and therefore of immediacy, lights up and warms tracks like "Before" or "Snowman", a touching vocal turn from Amedeo. And so the experiment of invention becomes urgency, and the state of grace a necessity. “Now don’t you feel in your bones we are coming to the end of an era/ and we standing at the edge of cliff once again/ are you ready to jump off?” (from "Melody Experiment").

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