Clockwise from left: Kazu Makino, Simone Pace, and Amadeo Pace
Mlynarski, Sebastian
Blonde Redhead
Issue #31
More than a decade since the Certain Three’s inception, frontwoman Kazu Makino continues to challenge the meaning of ‘pretty’ on their seventh album, 23
By Daphne Carr
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Blonde Redhead came together in a classic New York story. Italian twin brothers Amadeo and Simone Pace met Kazu Makino, a Japanese art student, in a restaurant in 1993. She started taking guitar lessons from Amadeo, and then they began dating. Another art student, Maki Takahashi, joined the band but left after their 1995 self-titled debut. They played guitars and drums and had girl/guy vocals where Takahashi was soft and yielding to Makino’s tsunami-esque presence. Named after a song by no wave pioneers DNA that was first recorded by Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley for his Smells Like Records imprint, Blonde Redhead was New York City’s prime indie-experimental inheritor in the 1990s.
By the late 1990s, a low point in the city’s rock history, Blonde Redhead was one of the sure draws, playing frequently with bands they considered kin: intellectual punks like the Make-Up, Unwound, and Fugazi. In a 2004 Magnet magazine interview, Makino and Simone discussed how as foreigners they felt outside of the world that bands like Pavement and Modest Mouse referenced in their songs — they did not share the middle-American mythos. Perhaps not coincidentally, their song lyrics were more about emotional states (characteristically melancholic), and their principal draw was about unquantifiable things like “presence,” “groove,” and “energy.” Makino said that when Unwound named its 1996 album Repetition, she was jealous, since repetition-induced hypnosis was “the big concept” for her band.
In the early 2000s, when New York City broke nationally, Blonde Redhead was already an historical reference — a band that kept New York cool in the 1990s but not a present-day buzzworthy band like the Strokes. It was at this time that Blonde Redhead changed gears from guitar-driven, dissonant noise rock to a more sophisticated and subdued pop formula. Simone’s drums became more propulsive, Amadeo’s guitar effects toned down to more clean melodic lines, and Makino’s bloodcurdling yelps calmed slightly, sounding like Björk or an unfettered version of what Steve Albini caught for Joanna Newsom on Ys. By 2000, when the trio released the excellent Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Blonde Redhead had found
its stride.
Misery Is a Butterfly came two years after a serious accident that almost claimed Makino’s life. During a riding lesson, she was thrown from her horse and trampled, breaking her jaw in several places. Her jaw was wired shut and after healing, she had to relearn how to sing. She and Amadeo now work at a stable, and horses grace the band’s Web site without a trace of menace.
Misery Is a Butterfly received mixed reviews, and most press focused on how the band left Touch & Go for 4AD, suggesting that this prompted their turn to a more classic shoegazer sound. The truth was that the band recorded itself with Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, and the label signed them before it had even heard their masters. They left Touch & Go in part because they wanted to license their music and because they wanted more label support.
Now that Blonde Redhead is releasing its seventh full-length, 23, and celebrating its 13th year as a band, it’s time to look at the band — and Makino’s voice in particular — as a watershed. They have made an increasingly good living from their music and have put out consistently great if not groundbreaking albums. Blonde Redhead features a nontraditional instrumentation and boasts a female leader whose voice challenges expectations of what “feminine” and “pretty” can and should sound like. They are, in many ways, the quintessential indie-rock success story.
Makino and the Pace brothers, unlike many bands in the decade-plus category, spend a lot of their free time together. Makino said being friends with them is like “being in the military” because the twins get up early and keep a tight schedule. “It must be the cappuccino because they’re already through their day by the time I’m deciding where to eat breakfast.” Their tightness extends to the studio. “I hear about other bands, like TV on the Radio, where they have one member in the studio at a time. ‘How mature,’ I think.”
For 23, the band tried out five engineers and decided to work with Chris Coady, who’s noted for his work with the new generation of New York rockers. Makino said they chose Coady because he’s “a bit crazy.” How so? “Well, once he was talking to himself and then he said, ‘This conversation is exhausting me,’ but no one had said anything to him for quite a long time!” Makino said the craziness — plus the fact that the band trusts him — is why they respect him. “One night I was really frustrated trying to do a vocal, and I went next door to a TV on the Radio party,” Makino said. “Nick [Zinner] from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was there, and it was the first time I’d met him. He said, ‘So you’re working with Chris next door.’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and we both started laughing.”
Blonde Redhead is equally eccentric, said Makino, so while “other bands would have had a nervous breakdown in the studio,” they were just fine. After all, “We didn’t know the structure of the songs, we didn’t have lyrics, and often Chris would have his hand on the record button, and we’d still be working things out.” Once the instrumental parts were laid out, then came the real drama. Amadeo, it seems, is a studio perfectionist. “He becomes obsessed, like he’ll hear something that’s perfectly in tune as out of tune and make me do it over and over,” Makino said. “I know he can’t help it, so that’s why I don’t kill him, but it’s painful to be around.”
For three of the album’s tracks, the band employed legendary alternative rock producer Alan Moulder to mix the album. Makino wrote him a letter after he initially said he was too busy. Eventually Moulder said he’d maybe do one song. “I think at this point he doesn’t even know who he’ll be mixing on a given day,” Makino said. “He just has a secretary who keeps the schedule. In my letter, I said he could do whatever his heart desired, but he wanted some guidance, like, ‘Tell me what you like about the song.’ He’d say, ‘I think this bass part is really good,’ and we’d go from there. It was such a pleasure to see a song take off on its own.”
While Amadeo is the control freak, Makino is happy to put her trust in someone she respects. She only had one request. “In the beginning, we hid the harmonies or deconstructed them, made them noisy,” she said. “On Misery, we weren’t so shy about harmonies. On that album, I still wasn’t sure how my voice wanted to sound. With this album, I knew.”
On the title track, Makino asked Moulder to make her voice as pretty as possible. The vocal floats in the middle of the mix on a bed of electronic pads shifting just behind her own pitch changes, creating a time-lapsing shoegaze effect. A choir of Makino’s appears for choruses, and harmonies drift seamlessly into instrumental parts. Simone’s drums bubble, and Amadeo’s guitar seems everywhere at once. The song, like many others on the album, is in Makino’s words, “drunken.” Moulder’s mixes have standard endings, but many other tracks just fade out, suggesting somewhere, the tape is still going. 23 is indeed beautiful, but unsurprisingly so. The make-or-break manic caterwaul of Makino’s voice has long been gone.
A long and painful process, the recording of 23 was not without positives for her. “You’re always proud of what you’ve recorded, but I still haven’t made the ultimate song that I would be pleased to,” Makino said. “Well, that’s what I’m worried about with this album. I’m star-struck by my own songs. What if I can’t top them?”
Makino said 23 doesn’t remind her of anything, and that’s what makes her happy. “Some bands who’ve come this far have the weight of history,” she said. “This is new, maybe not career-wise, but musically. It’s going to give me reason to keep doing it.”
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