PULSE
AUGUST 2000
JACKSON GRIFFITH
BLONDE REDHEAD Examines its roots
HOW'S THIS FOR exotic? A downtown NYC trio featuring twin brothers from
Milan by way of Montreal, along with one twins Japanese girlfriend.
Because the guitar-playing couple likes to explore unorthodox guitar
tunings, and because the band recorded its first two albums for Steve
Shelley's Smells Like Records label, it sometimes gets compared to Sonic
Youth.
However, if Blonde Redhead, which takes its name from a song by Arto Lindsay's '80s no-wave combo DNA, reaches toward any one band on its fifth album, Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons (Touch and Go), it's Abbey Road-era Beatles. Not in any retro, powerpop sense, mind you, but in the beat-driven baroque-isms, like diminished and minor-key harmonies a Ia Abbey Road's "Because," that pop up throughout Damaged Lemons.
Chalk part of that up to the classical-piano schooling Kazu Makino received in her native country. Her favorite composer is the everpopular Mozart, and she claims she tutored herself, vocally, by listening to opera singer Maria Callas. "This is maybe what I wish it is, but I feel there are things about our music that are quite beautiful?" she says about her band's pursuit of aesthetic progression, with a rising inflection at the end that suggests that perhaps she may not be so sure. "Even though we live in a punk-rock circuit, or environment, but I think that that is really deep inside of us, the beautiful, and we've learned to play them in an abrasive way. I mean, when I listen to classical music, I think, wow, this is such a pop, catchy song, like it's such a hit. I hear it like that."
Makino shares a bed and band vocals with Blonde Redhead's other guitarist, Amedeo Pace, who in turn is the twin brother of drummer Simone Pace. The tightly knit group got together in the early 1990s, following the twins' education at Boston's infamous Berklee School of Music. Makino isn't sure of an exact date, or details. However, her opening verses to the new album's "This Is Not" may tell part of the story: "Once she loved a boy/But he did not love her/His name was Jun/Disillusioned she tried to forget/So he left everything and traveled to the other side of the world/But life was like a dream/ A series of meaningless movement/ and then by chance she saw you and your brother."
"I don't know why that lyric came out," she says. "It sounds like it's about me and the twins. But I'm not sure. My lyrics, often whatever comes to my mind. I write them down; I try not to collect them too much. When you think you know yourself, often you start to put on paper what you want yourself to be, rather than who you are."
The band's pipeline into the unconscious approach, coupled with Makino and Amedeo's unintended ESL poeticisms, make for stunning, oblique-angled rock'n'roll, like on her "Hated Because of Great Qualities" and his answer that follows, "Loved Despite of Great Faults." Like other now-highly esteemed noise, Blonde Redhead's music is a happy mistake of chemistry. As it should be.
"Whatever comes to my mind, I try not to censor it too much."
