Blonde Redhead

In 2000, Blonde Redhead sealed their passage into the new millennium by going straight into the studio with Guy Picciotto (Rites of Spring, Fugazi) and Ryan Hadlock (The Lumineers). They chose to record during the coldest months of the year at Bear Creek Studio, in the woods outside Seattle, to create a fifth album that would end up representing a perfect compositional and sonic synthesis of their discography, moving even further away from the noise-rock of "La mia vita violenta" (Smells Like Records, 1995), while still keeping their distance from the dream-pop turn of "Misery Is A Butterfly" (4AD, 2004).

"Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons" is a red-hot album, full of the sensuality and unpredictability typical of the trio's productions: singer/guitarist/pianist Kazu Makino, of Japanese origin, singer/guitarist/bassist Amedeo Pace, and drummer/keyboardist Simone Pace, two brothers born in Milan and raised in Montreal. The setting for their artistic transformation could only be the New York underground, where the trio's paths intertwined in the early Nineties, never to part ways again.

The trio's art-rock, along with contemporary experiences like Cibo Matto, ideally forms the link between different generations: the one reflecting on the "post" of rock bands like Sonic Youth and Swans - influenced by the sound and practices of no wave and experimental guitarists like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham - and that of bands with an equally personal profile within the post-punk context, such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Tv On The Radio and Battles, who would emerge from New York in the 2000s.

The title borrows an expression from American slang meaning "to have your car break down," and that's how the band sees the development of their melodies. Emblematic of this fractured yet sinuous flow is, right at the start of the tracklist, "In Particular," the quintessence of the Blonde Redhead style: a swarm of sounds and trilling guitars over a dry rhythm section free of clattering cymbals - the hi-hat is closed - punctuated by handclaps reminiscent of Stereolab, where at a certain point the melodies fall into unison. Kazu sings:

Lying on my back, I heard music

Felt unsure and catastrophic

Had to tell myself it's only music

It blows my mind, but it’s like that

Other tracks unfold with an imperious, nervous energy, carried by Amedeo's nasal voice, often doubled by guitars and synthesizers as in "Melody Of Certain Three," or opening up to moments of dissonance as in "Loved Despite Of Great Faukts," making room for sudden expansions of time and sound, as in the ballads sung by Kazu, "Hated Because Of Great Qualities," a magnificent, dark, yearning song full of breaths and waiting, or the minimal "For The Damaged," where the voice is accompanied by piano and acoustic guitar:

Secret, so sorry, but I forgot

Secret, secret, we are bound to forget

I was worried I might be rude to you

So worried that I wasIt’s a lie to serve the truth

And I’m still guilty

Oh, I missed

So be it

Amedeo and Kazu's voices meet on tracks with a post-rock feel, like "A Cure," all beats and soft slide-guitar notes; at the same time, livelier episodes peek through, like "This Is Not," reminiscent of the robotic sound of Devo and Residents, or noisier ones like "Mother," marked by the sonic deflagration of no wave.

Further breaking up the rhythm and sequence of the songs are more experimental interludes, such as the unsettling electronic nursery rhyme of "Ballad Of Lemons," or more conventional ones, like the classic, dramatic close of "For The Damaged Coda," drawn from Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne in F minor Op. 55 No. 1 and arranged as wordless sighs, respectively opening and stitching together the album's overall tracklist.

Being inside a secret - that's the feeling this album gives you. Finding yourself within the mysterious alchemy that governs the relationship between Kazu and the Pace brothers, just as intense and enigmatic live as on record. "Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons" draws us into this emotional and mental intimacy, utterly magnetic, that binds the trio together, and through them, their listeners. Listening back to the album, it's hardly surprising that the band would come to regard it as a landing point, before moving on to an orchestral dream-pop, at times baroque and more cerebral.

After the album's release, Blonde Redhead embarked on a long tour - including support slots for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters - which brought them to Italy in the summer of 2001, an on-the-road journey captured by director Dick Rude, full of scents and flavours evocative, for the Paces, of a distant childhood. The documentary "Nothing Something" (2002), shot as a film-diary, presents and reconstructs what Rude himself, rightly, calls "a band in a state of grace" during that last summer of (apparent) collective carefreeness, just weeks before the events of September 11 would change everyone's life.

"Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons" thus carries the flavour of experimentation, of depth, of a reflection on cross-genre songwriting and of having the time to make a full album rather than a string of singles. It reminds us of a lost time, yes, but above all one lived intensely and brought to fruition in the creation of an all-consuming work.

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27/06/2021