It is 30 years since claustrophobic New York three-piece Blonde Redhead appeared kicking and screaming (and that is just what went on between the band members) and almost a decade since their last release ‘Barragán’, almost proved the nail in the coffin for one of North America’s more daring experimental outfits.
Long simmering creative frictions between Japanese lead singer Kazu Makino (voice/guitar) and her bandmates, identical Italian twin brothers Amedeo (vocals/guitar) and Simone Pace (drums) reinforced the notion that you can’t win a two front-war, with the likelihood of any future material from the trio seemingly lost.
In the intervening years Kazu Makino released a solo record, perhaps lancing a boil which had festered since her early days within the band. With that out of the way, she felt it was time to rejoin her muses on album number ten, although it hastaken five years to painstakingly piece together.
The title track ‘Sit Down for Dinner’ is inspired by a long-standing band ritual, (echoed in the prison scene in ‘Goodfellas’), forming the featherbed two-part centrepiece at the album’s core, dreamy and woozy in equal measure. The rest of the album feels like decidedly grown-up soft rock with a distinctly European feel, the quality control staying high throughout.
We are treated to gloriously detached expansive pop in spades from the sublime ‘Kiss Her Kiss Her’, ‘Not for Me’, ‘Melody Experiment’, and ‘Before’ with vocal duties roughly split between the two singers. The album occasionally veers westwards in terms of sound but never for too long, the brief warm Pacific breeze soon replaced by a bracing Nordic blast headed for the Alps, the cobwebs gone for the time being.
What is not in doubt is the craft behind each of the eleven songs, each a demonstration of how far the trio has travelled sonically from their garage band origins a lifetime ago.
They are simply mellowing with age.
Words - Michael Price
Blonde Redhead official