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Apr 09, 2004 12:00 a.m. - KINGBLIND: Music, Art & Entertainment
Blonde Redhead recorded Misery Is A Butterfly without a label
Before The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, before Liars, before The Strokes, there was Blonde Redhead. Since 1993, the New York trio have been exploring the fringes of style-damaged post-punk artifice, crafting severe, angular musical sculptures dusted with the alien voices of Kazu Makino and Amadeo Pace. And really, at least when it comes to style, no one’s beat them yet. Then again, it’s hard to compete with a Japanese chanteuse and two Italian-cum-Quebecois twins. "I still feel like a foreigner here, or when I go to Italy or when I go to Montreal," says Simone Pace, the band’s soft-spoken percussionist, on the phone from New York. Alienation has always been a big part of Blonde Redhead’s music, but on their new disc, the lush, otherwordly Misery Is A Butterfly, the band take it one step further, moving from alienation to just plain alien. "We started recording our record on our own, and we financed it on our own," Pace says, explaining the circumstances leading to the growth in the band’s sound, which paralleled their move to new label 4AD. "We didn’t want to have any kind of limits with what we wanted to do as far as expenses, because with [former label] Touch & Go sometimes things were a little tight. We weren’t sure which label we would try to release it with, but we wanted to license the record — we didn’t want the labels to own it forever. When we were finished, we were open to options, and 4AD was one of the labels that was really interested." It’s easy to see why. Misery Is A Butterfly (produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, who also helmed the band’s last record, Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons) is a big step forward, adding strings and dense textures to the Blonde Redhead sound. Although their trademarks — Makino’s dry, Liz Fraser-esque voice, Simone Pace’s unconventional rhythms and Amadeo Pace’s austere instrumentation — are still there, the overall effect is more enveloping than jarring, recalling the shimmering atmospherics of the Cocteau Twins and Mono. It’s a perfect fit for the trademark 4AD sound, although Pace says that’s purely coincidental. "You make a record and it comes out on a label, and people are going to start hearing this and this, and saying it makes sense that it’s on this label," says Pace. "But the record was complete before we knew which label it was going to be on, so it had nothing to do with the fact that we wanted to make it sound a certain way. To be honest, the only experience we have with 4AD is, I used to listen to a lot of the Pixies and I think Lush was on 4AD, too — but that’s pretty much it. Everything else comes from a different place." The band are currently touring the record, with guests the Secret Machines (whose own new disc, Now Here Is Nowhere, is an early contender for album title of the year). They also recently completed their first ever video for the song "Equus." But they aren’t looking for MTV success, or even the kind of hipster celebrity enjoyed by their upstart NYC peers. In fact, Pace says (in true Blonde Redhead form), that mostly, they’re content to stay inside. "[The music scene] does register to some extent. But the three of us don’t go out and hear music that much. We aren’t fanatics that go out and listen to all the New York bands to try and see what it is that’s going on here.”
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