Seventeen years is a long time by anyone's standards. In music, it‘s more than a lifetime. Now in their seventeenth year, New York trio Blonde Redhead’s newest record sees them settling into a twilight era of crystallised consciousness and portent atmospherics. That’s not to say the group are on the wane, far from it, Penny Sparkle’s merely the culmination of a journey that started somewhere around the turn of the century (around the time of 2000’s Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons) and has seen them renounce the feedback infused art-aesthetic they’d previously endorsed in search of something more, if not classic, then eternal.
In fact, time’s something that invigorates the album throughout. Like much of predecessor 23, Blonde Redhead pace themselves deliberately, shrouding their melancholy in electronic orchestration and vocalist Kazu Makino’s ethereal breaths. Though it tends towards Penny Sparkle settling rather than fitting, the mood suits, allowing the group to maintain a composed state in which experimental tendencies are assuaged by a desire for cohesion. If this is music for darkened rooms, then it’s an elder couple’s candle lit caress compared to, say, The XX’s horny fondle.
As on 23, Alan Moulder returns on mixing duties, and production duo Van Rivers and The Subliminal Kid (Fever Ray’s resident knob twiddlers) sit behind the desks, lending the album an air of concentrated fragility. Able to coax the sweetest pop hooks from the most unlikely of origins, the guitars are nearly all gone, and if not, manipulated into something cadenced rather than caustic.
Though the band’s output never felt particularly loving, now it’s almost exclusively so. Amadeo Pace’s delivery on ‘Will There Be Stars’ and ‘Black Guitar’ acts as the susurrated counterpoint to Makino’s alluring vocals. On earlier releases the pair were happy to play the tortured artist, their’s was a pathos that left little room for the listener to share, but since the energy once expended rattling their instruments has been restrained and channelled elsewhere, we can share their woes. ’My Plants Are Dead’ scratches deep scars of guitar into Makino’s punctured lungs, and opener ‘Here Something’ elucidates her lonely dreams atop firecracker percussion and gyrating synth.
Blonde Redhead’s biggest detractors always put their reservations down to their resemblance to Sonic Youth, on Penny Sparkle the traces of influence are mere whiffs, and the progressions enough to offer something different for someone at home (or ill at ease) with their back catalogue. Seventeen years is a long time, but Blonde Redhead are proving that lasting more than a lifetime can have it’s advantages. - Alex Hibbert
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