Blonde Redhead
A Great Exhale
Words by Jasper Willems
Distinguished art-rockers Blonde Redhead have been unceasingly pegged as an American band, even though no one in the band is, in fact, American. It always struck as a rather strange thing to not second-guess. Founded by Japanese artist Kazu Makino and the Italian twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace, Blonde Redhead have been perfect strangers from the very start: a band at the right place at the right time. Though culturally speaking, they remain relatively unmoored from the East Coast hotbed of alternative music that set their progress in motion.
In hindsight, that sense of rootlessness may have benefited Blonde Redhead over the long haul. Their music seems forever ageless, existing outside time and space. “We have a new manager now who’s so great, he had been digging up our past for a business reason,” says Makino. referring to 2016’s Masculin Féminin, a compilation of Blonde Redhead’s first two albums on Steve Shelley’s Smells Like Records. “And he’s like scratching his head, telling us ‘You just keep changing, floating and moving around. You never work with the same people, you never work in the same place. You just keep drifting. I’ve been in this business for many years, and I can literally tell you every person with some capacity has worked on your band.’ Hearing that was a little bit frightening to me. But I guess that means that we’ve been totally fluid all the time and just kept moving in the other way.” She pauses and giggles, as if a private thought just entered her mind. “A fucking hot mess, you know?”
A hot mess that, up till now, adhered to the trio’s mystifying internal logic. Blonde Redhead may have been a band for 30 years, but even its founding members themselves aren’t much wiser of why that internal logic has manifested into landmark records. Makino’s well-documented health problems with her lungs might be emblematic to Blonde Redhead’s career arc: from an anxious inhale to a great exhale. Their 90’s tenure under Smells Like Records was riddled with expressive, tension-riddled art rock. These stylings twined elegantly into consensus masterpiece Misery Is a Butterfly (2004), the foreboding 23 (2007) and finally, the schismatic electronic pop of Penny Sparkle (2010). On 2014’s Barragán, we found Blonde Redhead on the other side of that prism, with a lusher sound that juxtaposed electronic and organic instrumentation.
Which brings us to Sit Down For Dinner, the group’s tenth LP, sounds like a mellower and beachier Blonde Redhead, one ready to exhale after years of creative strife and dysfunction. Sitting down for dinner is a cherished ritual for both Makino and the Pace twins, as stated in the press release. It’s when you look each other in the eye, talk about your day, and resolve grievances. It’s also when a lot of discomfort in close relationships becomes palpable, simmering beneath a diaphanous veil of joy and communion.
To dramatically declare Sit Down For Dinner as the record where Amedeo, Kazu and Simone finally reckon with each other’s creative differences, however, would be a bit of a stretch. In Makino’s own words, Blonde Redhead still remains a “really difficult” band to work in, and maybe that’s always been part of the point. “I don’t know what it is about this band,” she muses. “It’s a highly competitive environment. If one person does a lot, the other person feels unimportant, and I really hope that that can change. But that’s kind of always been there. So in many ways, it’s still a battle to work with Amedeo and Simone. At the same time, you know, like, Ame is really devoted to work with me, and he’s really selfless. I can always trust him and work with him. But, yeah, even if they don’t admit it, I think it’s the nature of twins. They can’t help it — there’s an almost instinctive competition for attention.”
What may be a first for Blonde Redhead is that all of the members make a concentrated effort to unravel themselves and embrace their vulnerability, something that was especially counter-intuitive for Amedeo. For Makino on the other hand, Sit Down For Dinner was very much a continuation of the creative streak she enjoyed when working on her solo debut, 2019’s Adult Baby. The record — made with producer Sam Owens (aka Sam Evian, who also lent some production assistance on Sit Down For Dinner) — gave Makino full autonomy to experiment with her voice and electronic sounds.
“For me, doing Adult Baby was about proving to myself that I can make music without Simone and Amedeo, and it gave me an undeniable confidence. So this time I felt I was not going to step aside until I feel I’m done with my part of the record. I made that really, really clear. But I think Simone suffered: during one interview I was having a lot of fun, and right after it was done, he confessed he was miserable. He couldn’t express himself and felt like he wasn’t given the chance to do that. He was full of resentment. I was like, ‘Okay, you really want the world to know that?’ But he more or less said: ‘Does it matter? Because I know that in the end I know we made a great album.’”
If there’s one thing Sit Down For Dinner does accomplish, it’s that it’s easier on the ears — and more unabashedly pretty — than any Blonde Redhead album before it. And perhaps, that subtle stylistic shift was the cushion needed for its creators to unburden themselves a little further than even they themselves anticipated. The opening track, the breezy Amedeo-penned “Snowman,” is heavily influenced by Brazilian experimental music — a masterclass in atmospherics with its sun-flare guitars and Makino’s ghostly yelps. The song expresses his difficulty of expressing oneself: Simone and percussionist Mauro Refosco curate its humid, limber pulse, giving the impression that the titular snowman has found himself in a warm climate, his cold exterior gradually melting away.
Makino was shocked out of her system in a different way. When her asthmatic symptoms worsened, she left New York for Elba, an Island in Tuscany famous for being Napoleon’s base of retreat, to recover. When the COVID-outbreak happened in Italy, Makino was forced to leave for New York’s polluted skyline again, which was — modestly put — a less than ideal predicament. “When things went down, everyone’s plan went out the window, right? I think we all had plans and dreams. And all that had to be forgotten about, because we had such an urgent matter to deal with.” Makino now acknowledges a silver lining behind it all. “What that seemed to be telling me is that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to retire on this little island and just pretend like I’m done with my career in music.”
Makino deliberately lifted the album’s title from Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking: “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” After her beloved horse and “soulmate” Harry died (inspiring the ethereal requiem “Rest of Her Life”), Makino picked up the book by accident. “I had no idea this book dealt with only death, you know? Who would think that when you see a title like The Years of Magical Thinking?’ So I was like, okay I need that.”
Makino was taken aback how the ‘magical’ outline of the book was rather misleading, as it paints an abject, kitchen sink depiction of grief. It went against Makino’s own starry-eyed instincts: she professes she would listen more often to someone like Sufjan Stevens than Elliott Smith, even though she deeply loves both artists. “I’ve seen [Smith] play live and, you know, I really feel like he was here for that purpose; to make sad music that was really beautiful. I think his role on earth was just to do that and then leave. I don’t know. It was not sustainable the way he was doing it, you know?” Smith first made his mark during Blonde Redhead’s formative years in the mid-90s, whereas Stevens — who is a good friend of Makino’s — became a household name when the band’s sound started to veer away from abrasive noise. “Because you get too damaged if you go to certain places. I often feel like I’m not solid enough to take it all the way. I kind of feel like that about Sufjan Stevens’s music. I like his music and I feel a kind of strength I don’t feel in Elliott Smith’s music. I’m always rooting for [Sufjan]: his music always tells you, ‘You can come out on top, you can survive this!’ I feel like he has a profound understanding for life and death. So I’m always rooting for him, because he kind of has a tenacity to come back up again.”
With that in mind, one could imagine reading The Year of Magical Thinking in a time of Makino’s own dealings with death and grief as an intrusive experience, nevertheless one she powered through. Her visceral wordless vocal experiments — including screams of anguish on “Sit Down For Dinner, Part II,” which Amedeo clandestinely recorded without Makino’s knowledge — might have been placed at the forefront during Blonde Redhead’s inception during the 90s on records like their self-titled debut and In an Expression of the Inexpressible.
“That scream on “Sit Down For Dinner, Part II,” happened literally during the pandemic, when I was reading Joan Didion’s book. My horse just passed away, who was like my soulmate. I was so depressed and devastated, I was crying and screaming. I can’t believe Ame had the presence of mind to record that. I was living with Ame and his girlfriend at the time; that was already a lot, because Ame and I used to be together. I was crazy, and Ame recorded it all. After that, we processed it all and put it through lots of effects and that became the scream on the song” On Sit Down For Dinner, these impulsive vocal experiments — bred out of Makino’s candid devastation — add a strange textural beauty, not sullying the harmonic space of the melodies. It makes the devastation softer, instead of heavier.
Indeed, with Sit Down For Dinner, Blonde Redhead somehow created a harmonic sounding record about experiencing disarray. Then again, the trio maintain their distinct mystique, no less on the record where they unburden themselves further than ever.
“People have told us in the past: even if you make another great record like 23, nobody is going to listen to it. You have to shed your skin and put yourself in a really unknown territory. You need to feel uncomfortable to be truly creative.” Makino darts her eyes, revealing skepticism in that last platitude. “People say shit like that all the time right? I mean, we gave that a go in the past. But then I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do that this time around. I’m going to feel really comfortable making this album.’ I wasn’t going to some unknown place hoping it would work out. I knew exactly what this record was going to become. And I fucking love that, you know?”
