Is this a good thing? Well, there’s no getting around the fact that the boys and (at this point, two) girls of Blonde Redhead hadn’t fully come into their own yet. kings and queen of New York scuzz, and perhaps similarly so to those who aren’t. On which note, Blonde Redhead is just under half an hour of skronky bastardisation between angular guitar melodies and brittle dissonance that will sound deeply familiar to anyone acquainted with the O.G. Phew, one sentence in and I already need a drink. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was Sonic Youth, and the man from Sonic Youth (lil metronome boy Steve Shelley) produced Blonde Redhead’s self-titled debut, and – shock horror – it sounded a helluva lot like Sonic Youth. Make it to the end, and if I’ve failed to map out the full picture in suitable clarity, you’ll at least have a handful of killer records to sink some plays into. Let’s go there, no half measures: every single Blonde Redhead full-length or significant orbital album, in order of release. More than the sum of its parts? Everything ? Well, yes. I don’t have many wild claims to make about them, though I will say that their masterpiece 23 is hands down a stronger and more worthwhile shoegaze outing than Loveless (a hill I will happily die on) the gist is more that their discography is a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts deal where each album is a distinct and necessary lens for viewing an evasive thread of intrigue and anxiety that runs in various forms through everything the group ever touched. It took me a bloody long time to get the full sense of it, but I think Blonde Redhead embody more than the crossroads appeal of frosty arthouse practitioners, tap into a deceptively deep emotional reserve, and are ultimately a much more rewarding and enduring band than many people give them credit for. At first glance, it’s easy to see why they attract stiff appreciation more than passionate admiration: there’s a distinct craft to their music, but it’s distant and often phlegmatic in a way that hardly invites best-thing-ever statements from the hype brigade, and is mistakenly dismissible as shallow formalism by the purists – but that’s only half the story. A longstanding power trio consisting of identical Italian twins Amedeo and Simone Pace and Japanese frontwoman Kazu Makino, they occupy a highly respected status within and without their homeground NYC scene despite never having released anything at the top of the pile for the fanatics and gatekeepers of their genres in question (in order: noise rock, chamber pop, shoegaze, dream pop). Sorry not sorry for the wank onslaught, but all this fits Blonde Redhead down to a tee and explains both their critical consensus and favouring demographics with uncommon accuracy. Bonus points for any cross-cultural, trans-geographical or oh-it’s-quite-hard-to-label-comprehensively content, all of which amounts to a notoriously broad collection of categories. It derives most of its innovation from pastiche and appropriation rather than groundbreaking originality, and the styles it draws from are often both a little behind the times in their sourcing and a cut above in the way they’re dealt with. A bastard product of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art that’s not pure enough to satisfy elitists, too edgy to sell to the mainstream, but an exciting box of treats for anyone who doesn’t mind getting their paws a little muddy. I spent approximately two hours of my life reading relatively uncomplex definitions and unpackings, but damn would it have been easier if he’d just sent me away and told me to check out Blonde Redhead (I’m sure he could have done, too – he pitched surrealist film to me using Pixies lyrics and half the reason I originally asked him to help me out was over a rant we had about the bonus tracks on Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, but I digress). Back at university, I remember there being a point at which my dissertation tutor told me to put the whole thing on hold and read up on the meaning and application of arthouse.
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