Blonde Redhead by Charles Billot
Art in its purest form is a conversation with the audience: sometimes a dialogue intended to teach and spur debate; other times, an ethereal exposé of its creator’s innermost thoughts.
Sit Down For Dinner, by New York noise rock/art pop auteurs Blonde Redhead, could be considered both. Co-founder Kazu Makino has said that the band’s 2023 album — their tenth, and first since 2014’s Barragán — is in part a contemplation of death and mourning. The sense of loss, moving through veils of sound, is acutest in the album’s centerpiece: a pair of title tracks, labeled parts 1 and 2, inspired by the late Joan Didion’s 2005 book, “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Makino has said that she was working on a follow-up to Barragán when COVID-19 struck. With the world on pause, Makino happened to pick up Didion’s memoir about losing her husband, the journalist and writer John Gregory Dunne, who died suddenly at the couple’s dining table. “You sit down for dinner/and the life as you know it ends/No pity,” Makino sings in Part 2, channeling Didion’s own text.
Music about endings isn’t an unexpected development for a band that formed 30 years ago and has managed to keep its core trio intact through everything that conspires against growth and continuity. It’s helped that Blonde Redhead have always embraced change. They started out in noise-rock territory and, over time, employed more shoegaze and dream-pop elements to fill out a sound that aligned with Sonic Youth and is now something unto itself.
Sit Down For Dinner is quiet and melodic, a different animal from the group’s past output but one that keeps the bones of the band’s sound in place. Makino has also said that she came into the latest collaboration with sibling bandmates Amedeo Pace and Simone Pace in a different frame of mind. “I’ve been quite aggressively chasing some kind of independence,” she told Pitchfork in 2023. “I could see (my bandmates) were a little intimidated, so I took advantage of that. My approach is a weird combination of naiveness and experience.”
Blonde Redhead plays Friday, February 23 at Winterland Six in Jacksonville. blonde-redhead.com winterlandpresents.org ~ Tim Moffatt
