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Blonde Redhead have an album out called Misery Is a Butterfly. It’s on 4AD, a new label following the band’s departure
from Touch and Go. As the title of the album might indicate, this band
deals in multiple emotional terrains, usually simultaneously. Misery. Is a…Butterfly.
By now you’ve seen their photograph:
Two handsome identical twin brothers, Amedeo and Simone Pace from Italy,
framing a beautiful young woman from Kyoto, Kazu Makino. That’s Amedeo on
guitar or bass and vocals; Simone is the drummer, an extraordinarily
hard-rocking and idiosyncratic one (he plays keyboards, too); Kazu plays
slanted and/or harsh and/or wrenchingly dramatized guitar shards, and sings
in a breathy, not-so-guileless sigh — or screeeeeeeeeems. But on record, at least, the screaming’s been
put on the back burner for now. No call for screaming when you need to
persuade.
Misery is a radiant thing — beautiful, but in peculiar
ways. In the context of the New York–based band’s past work, it feels like
a leap headfirst into the baldly breathtaking, and thus somewhat of a
departure. Past provocatively titled albums such as Fake Can Be Just As
Good, La Mia Vita Violenta and In an Expression of the Inexpressible had their obvious roots in hardcore and the
no-wave scene of downtown New York circa mid-’80s (specifically the
barbed-wire nihilism of DNA), combining a coolly intellectual yet jolting
claustrophobia via angular rhythm slashing and crooked melodic/textural
tendencies with a near-autistic urge toward minimalist-isolationist
meditations. These elements merely poked their semi-ugly heads up on 2000’s
oddly romantic/cinematic (and best-selling) Melody of Certain Damaged
Lemons and the follow-up Melodie
Citronique EP, however, as Blonde
Redhead gave hint that their partialities were broader and deeper and
perhaps less so highly conceptualized.
The new album finds this formerly lonely
and alienating music opening up like some kind of dark flower overflowing
with a strangely sweet nectar; a dam has burst, exploding with new tone
colors, new unidentifiable emotions. Whether because of Kazu’s alluring
sighs or Amedeo’s nerdy whine, it’s an almost overwhelmingly touching
sound, which had to have been a tricky proposition, since the band has
never concerned itself with “emotions” as such. Misery comes a long four years after the band’s last
album, and reveals an evolution perhaps explainable by the trio (founded in
the mid-’90s) having of course grown older — maturing; and there were a few events that put them on
hold for a while, including Kazu’s serious injury from falling off a horse.
Last week I talked to Amedeo about
the making of the album, and what the band were aiming for this time out.
What was going through their minds when they prepared the material? Time
for a change?
“We don’t put that kind of pressure
on ourselves,” he said. “I think it would be difficult to live like that.
Basically, we just kind of started writing, and then when it was time to
record it, we really took care about details. We really wanted the music to
come through. We worked on the record for a very long time; the problems
that delayed the recording allowed us to really get deeply into it. We had
more time to think about it, and develop the songs more. But I also feel
like we didn’t hold back on what we really wanted to do. Some of our
earlier records were a little more careful, and maybe we still needed to go
through certain things. On this record we just wanted the record to be
honest and completely open.”
Amedeo used the word honest in a hedging way, as if careful not to be
misunderstood. I suggested that the band had a romanticism they needed to
explore — this music is opulent, widescreen, even — as if they were
previously reluctant to flirt with something so blatantly human. But romanticism is a tricky term, and I was rather simplistic
about it.
“We’re always really cautious about
being too emotional,” said Amedeo. “We don’t want emotions to come through
so much. It’s almost like an addiction, you know, if you’re too emotional
in music. When you don’t have it, then you really miss that. So what we
tried to figure out is what we wanted for the songs to sound right, to have real emotional effect, and to spend time with that without feeling
awkward in any way.”
The band’s now wide-ranging and
open-ended sound owes its effect to some unusual compositional approaches
deriving from a lot of improvising in their rehearsal studio while ripping
off their own music in order to further develop it.
“It happens when we play old songs,”
said Amedeo. “We kind of grow out of the old songs, and we come up with new
songs that spin out of the old songs. Like ‘Falling Man’ on Misery is a result of ‘Melody of Certain Three’ on the
last album — it happened as a reaction to that. We’re unaware of what’s
going on usually when ideas come out; it’s pretty chaotic, everyone is
playing something different, and then the ideas come out. One thing leads
to another.”
Misery’s songs are constructed and enhanced in very
unstandard-rock-type ways, a bit more complex in how the parts are put
together, far more complex in their effect on the passions. I said the
songs have opened up like flowers; one explanation for this is the
confluent recent discovery by Blonde Redhead, the High Llamas, David Byrne
(who generated the tracks for his new Grown Backwards album by humming into a microcassette recorder)
and a few others that the tyranny of the “groove” — building songs by
piling parts on top of bass and drum tracks — has led to a very restrictive
harmonic/melodic palette from which to choose. On Misery, adding the bass and string parts last makes for
a crucial liberating of tone color, as if the songs were shot with 100
percent pure human blood. And the album just sounds different for its stormily imaginative use of
instrumental counterpoint (keyboards, guitars, drums and strings), which
isn’t too common in pop or rock music — if in fact that’s what Blonde
Redhead is making.
“The three of us spent a lot of time
figuring out the forms of the songs before we went into the studio. For the
strings, we spent two days working with a violin player — and there’s only
one person who did everything [he multitracked his parts]. We didn’t write
down any charts; we had a computer there in our house, and we sang in what
we like and we tried it, and then we added some other things to counter
that part. We didn’t have time to try different options; I think some stuff
could have been better, but I think when you do something for the first
time you tend to be really naive about it, which is good.”
The moral of the
story is twofold: 1) In much
great music, emotions are not the point, exactly — at least not the ones we’re familiar
with. And 2) musicians don’t always know what they’re doing till they’ve
done it — and they’re probably better off not knowing. Proof of this is the
special intuitive bond that exists between Kazu Makino and the brothers
Pace, which actually transforms the music they make together.
“I react to them so much, especially
to Kazu, when we work on melodies and harmonies,” said Amedeo. “We react to
each other — really, it’s strange, in ways that we don’t even have any
control over. I don’t know what I would do, how any of us would do, without
each other. 
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