Review Summary: Where we're going, we don't need roads.
New York City trio Blonde Redhead exist in that particular space in the music continuum where you’d be hard pressed to describe the band to a stranger, but when you hear a Blonde Redhead song, there’s no doubting who it is. Part of this can be chalked up to Kazu Makino’s ethereal, fragile vocals, and the way twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace play against her haunting lyrics, Simone’s own voice often providing a distinctive counterpoint. Yet for a band that has dabbled in no wave, shoegaze, art punk, ambient, noise rock, dream pop, and more over the course of their 21+ years, it’s more often the curious feel of the band’s compositions that define them than any nebulous genre tag. While the band’s ‘00s output defined that amorphous sound to a rapidly growing fanbase, mixing dreamy soundscapes with grit and a weirdly affecting emotional resonance, the narcotic synthesized soup of 2010’s
Penny Sparkle proved beyond a shadow of any doubt that, for Blonde Redhead, staying still was death. Now on their ninth record, Blonde Redhead do much more than refuse to get complacent –
Barragan is an overtly inaccessible, intricate maze of baroque songwriting and ghostly atmospherics that doesn’t so much take Blonde Redhead down the road less traveled as it simply removes the road altogether.
The theme of
Barragan is that there is no theme. Indeed, the overall feel of the record is one of an aimless trip, the kind inspired by a desire to simply go somewhere, map and motives be damned. It’s a record that floats along the lazy path tracked by Makino’s shiftless voice, a casual, almost druggy vibe enhanced by the record’s loose, whimsical production choices. The opening instrumental sounds like it should be soundtracking a misty wooded glen at a Renaissance fair, while “The One I Love” stumbles forward on a theremin melody infused with a sense of uneasiness, punctuated by that foreboding electronic swirl that closes the song out. The record’s earthy, almost improvisational feel is one of the most adventurous and colorful angles the band has ever taken. It is also one of its most unsettled. When the band nails the mix between this organic, wickedly subtle sound and the emotional lines Makino and the Paces have been so good at blurring,
Barragan is an unmitigated success. “Dripping” may be the most immediate song here, with its buoyant bass line and faux-disco feel betraying the anxiety bubbling just underneath the surface, and with Simone Pace’s underrated vocals centering everything, it feels like the best example of
Barragan’s exquisite, contradictory turmoil. The roiling guitars and ricocheting sounds on “No More Honey” work similarly well supporting Makino’s vocals, creating a mix that is at once eerie and reassuring. Perhaps the best ideas here are found in the motorik-groove and gauzy, warped miasma of sound that flutters through “Mind To Be Had.” Blonde Redhead certainly agree – at almost nine minutes long, the song sits on the dangerous border of being too much of a good thing.
Much of
Barragan likewise suffers not from a dearth of ideas, but from an almost pathological need to avoid repeating itself. A song like the somewhat jazzy trifle “Cat On Tin Roof” feels like it’s missing something more than just a function word – at one point, you can hear Makino in the studio mix, asking, “maybe we should work on it a little more” before Amedeo Pace noodles for a little bit on the guitar, more symbolically than usual, perhaps. “Defeatist Anthem (Harry & I)” starts off promising before degenerating into an out-of-place ambient recording and a clunky outro lost in its own murk; the equivalent of three songs awkwardly shoehorned into one. It’s emblematic of
Barragan as a whole, a record that produces a lot of interesting ideas but rarely takes any of them for more than a cursory stroll. By the end,
Barragan feels exhausted, both “Penultimo” and “Seven Two” barely making a ripple in the midtempo haze they find themselves trapped in. For all of its experimentation and eccentric production choices,
Barragan remains a strangely hollow record, unsure of where it wants to go or what it wants to be. Yet Blonde Redhead have never had a problem crafting impeccable mood music, off-kilter, emotionally inert and all the better for it. Indeed, the band has virtually made a career out of desultory wanderlust. The problem with
Barragan, however, is that there is no mood to be tracked, no depth to the sounds dreamed up here; it’s at turns charming and captivating and shallow and inconsequential. As a record,
Barragan concludes as a frustrating summation of Blonde Redhead’s overwhelming promise and a glaring reminder of the band’s flaws.
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