| · A four-year transformation complete.
Misery is a Butterfly is a record of surprises. Besides its four-year gestation period, a quiet label jump from American uber-indie Touch & Go to the London-based 4AD and the record’s sudden announcement of release having seemingly been made in secret, Misery is a Butterfly also brings with it an almost total re-interpretation of who Blonde Redhead are. Like the best surprises, Misery is a Butterfly is also bloody good.
Eschewing their earliest days as Sonic Youth-style noiseniks-in-training in favour of a new-found svelte European outlook bowing at the altar of Serge Gainsbourg, Blonde Redhead trade in their distortion pedals and awkward screams for strings, harps and octave-jumping vocal melodies. Opener "Elephant Woman" blends the spacious creamy dreams of the Cocteau Twins with the type of defiant anti-melody this trio has cultivated since the beginning and the combination snaps to a perfect fit. "Doll Is Mine" sounds like attending college in the ’80s – you can almost see Kazu Makino jumping around her dorm room, the walls covered in Cure posters and tin foil. "Falling Man" comes closest to what we’ve known before, the guitars spiked on an incline of tricky twists, co-vocalist Amadeo Pace still singing ever so slightly above his range.
Blonde Redhead sure can make a racket and at first it’s a bit of a shame that Misery is a Butterfly stays so calm (and for the most part) controlled. But it’s not just about noise anymore. Where Sonic Youth took nearly 20 years to attempt something quite so (erm) grown-up with the spoken-word free-skronk of NYC Ghosts and Flowers, Blonde Redhead’s biggest surprise is a near-perfect re-emergence as genuine pop sophisticates this early on. It’s doubtless now they’re in it for the long haul.
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