Blonde Redhead - No More Honey
I've spent a lot of my youth making fun of anyone who responds to the question, "What's your favorite band?" with any answer containing a caveat. Responding, "I like old school X" to answer that question suggests that you haven't explored enough music to find an artist whom you completely adore through their every age. Commit, people, and defend your love!
Yet, the older I get, the more I find myself wanting to answer that question in that exact way.
Blonde Redhead is one of my all-time favorite bands. There has never been a time in my life that Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons doesn't make me feel, as they say, "some kinda way," and I can't imagine it ever falling out of favor from my top five favorite albums. It's one of those works that takes me back to one very particular point in time: spring break, freshman year of high school, in Charleston, South Carolina. I escape to my room after deciding that Kill Bill: I is a film I cannot sit through the entirety of because it is so loud and so violent. (This is more of a testament to Tarantino's genius than how sheltered I was---I'm the youngest child, so all bets were off in that regard). I close my eyes, cue up my shock-guard CD/MP3 player, and drift off to sleep while Kazu Makino whispers about what, I don't know. That was actually the peak of my musical experimentation phase, and yet I had never heard anything quite like Blonde Redhead.
It isn't a huge deal to me when bands change their sound. I don't want to say it's always the job of the artist to change their approach (if you've got a good thing going, maybe don't fix what ain't broke), but ... it is kind of the job of the artist to come up with new ideas. Naturally, I will not like all of these ideas. But Blonde Redhead's 2004-~2010 period was different, and unlikeable, to me in a way that saddened me. If you follow them, you know that, during this period, Kazu was thrown off of a horse and spent a serious amount of time in recovery. Misery Is a Butterfly signaled the beginning of this post-accident period. It wasn't so bad; they changed up the instrumentation and spent more time in production.
23 was the first album I have ever listened to from a favorite band that actually upset me because I was so disappointed. It was the first time that I listened to an album and the thoughts came to me, "What do other people on the internet think about this?! Are they as upset as I am?" After googling, and checking their release history, I realized that I would have to wait about four years for their next release. That's a whole Olympic period!
What's funny is that, if Blonde Redhead had never released anything prior to that, I probably would have enjoyed 23.
Penny Sparkle was more of the same. I wasn't able to articulate what I didn't like about these two releases. Some kind of restraint. They sounded dead, in a way. I decided that Blonde Redhead had lost its magical spark, for whatever reason.
I was so deliciously wrong on that one. As I sat upon my bed the other night, closing my eyes, No More Honey came on. I had that sensation of brief silence in my mind's narration. It allowed for a faint epiphany:
I waited for over ten years for this track.
What I had craved, and what was finally back in full effect, was their fearlessness. I had always been drawn to their aesthetic of being totally stripped down, spare a few vocal effects. Kazu's voice, when unrestrained, is sublime; it becomes more instrument than anything else. The Pace brothers' lazy beat/guitar line reinforce the resignation of the line,
Whatever you do, I won't be sorry.
Of course, I can't speak to what the rest of this EP will bring us.
I will hope for the best.
Lesson learned, though: don't be afraid to be weird, y'all. Even if it's been a long ass time.