WEEKEND VIDEO / A FAVORITE FROM FIVE YEARS AGO
“Equus” |
April 9, 2004:
It’s taken many years for Blonde Redhead to emerge from the shadows of Sonic Youth, whose drummer Steve Shelley produced and released the New York art-rock trio’s 1995 debut and whose post-punk detunings and distortions were the shrill heart and abrasive soul of Blonde Redhead’s sound.
Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, released in 2000, signaled a shift toward subtler, more tuneful textures. With the group’s long-delayed new album, Misery is a Butterfly, Blonde Redhead’s reach widens still further, embracing the sort of tenderness, beauty, and sheer emotionalism one never would have predicted from these once stridently cerebral noisemongers.
“It’s pretty much out of our hands,” says guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Amedeo Pace, a native of Milan who formed Blonde Redhead in 1993 with his twin brother, Simone, a drummer; singer-guitarist Kazu Makino; and bassist Maki Takahashi, who is no longer in the group. “The songs come from some other place and they just seemed to require this kind of sound.”
Pace is reticent to analyze the evolution of Blonde Redhead’s sound, although he acknowledges that a serious injury suffered by bandmate and girlfriend Makino, in 2002, had a huge impact. Makino was thrown from a horse during a riding lesson; she broke her jaw in several places, and her mouth had to be wired shut for two months.
The recovery has been slow and painful.
“We postponed the record because of that, then had a few more troubles and postponed it a few more times,” Pace explains. “She was pretty messed up during the whole period, and it still affects her singing a little. But it’s getting better. As far as the emotions and the feelings on the record, I try not to think about it so much. I feel like some people get addicted to emotion in music, and that’s dangerous. We think about how the song sounds, and are we going to be able to play it live.”
Transposing the expansive, textured music on Misery is a Butterfly to the stage is proving to be a challenge, says Pace. “Each song has such a life to it, and we’re trying to capture that. The hardest part, actually, is going back and forth from old songs to new. But the flow is getting more natural every time.”