![]() Tellingly, the album’s most transfixing song is its most atypical, both in the context of this record and everything Blonde Redhead did after. There are touches of the melodic finesse that would flourish on later releases, but on songs like “Mama Cita” and “Astro Boy,” the staccato, circular singing often mirrors the needling guitar lines. The rest of *Blonde Redhead *is likewise built from serrated shards and sudden expulsions, with Kazu and Amadeao prodding and jousting one another in an attempt to figure out how their voices can interlock. While the deceptively calm mise-en-scène bears evidence of brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace’s jazz-schooled backgrounds, it’s soon vandalized by the former’s strangulated verse vocals and a frenzied climax where Makino unleashes a voice like a squawking saxophone. In discussing the band’s early years with the* Big Takeover* in 2011, singer Kazu Makino said, “I never thought we were violent or angry or post punk.” But you might get a different impression from their debut’s caterwauling opener “I Don’t Want U,” a he-scream/she-scream anti-love song scrawled with a bloody razor blade. But even on their 1995 debut, they were severing the abrasive sound of indie rock from its hardcore roots and refashioning it into something more impressionistic and enigmatic. And their standard four-piece rock-band lineup seemed traditional compared to the prevailing genre-hopping cut-and-paste style. At the same time, Matador Records were less interested in looking for the next Pavement than scooping up Japanese pastiche-pop acts like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius.īlonde Redhead weren’t as outwardly irreverent as the aforementioned artists-after all, they took their name from a song by no-wave iconoclasts DNA. The Beastie Boys were its most eager ambassadors, with a multi-cultural messthetic that filtered down to peers like Luscious Jackson, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing, and Cibo Matto, while their *Grand Royal *magazine packed a whole internet’s worth of global esoterica into its handsomely bound pages. But by the mid-’90s, it had become something more cosmopolitan, and New York, naturally, served as the primary melting pot. Through the 1980s, indie rock was built on American infrastructure: interstates and college towns and community-radio stations and Kinko’s. But while contemporary music-from indie rock to R&B-is now awash in ’90s nostalgia, the trend has mostly passed over the vibrant activity happening in New York at the time. The Big Apple sounds of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s have been thoroughly canonized in books, documentaries, fictional biopics, and ill-fated TV shows. ![]() But these days, the ’90s New York indie rock era feels equally remote. ![]() And the box set arrives via Numero Group, a reissue label best known for its archival digs through regional ’70s soul scenes from Ohio to Belize. Masculin Féminin compiles Blonde Redhead’s Smells Like catalogue-1994’s self-titled debut and 1995’s La Mia Vita Violenta-along with associated singles, outtakes, and radio sessions. Where Nirvana showed how Sonic Youth’s sturm-and-clang could be streamlined for mainstream rock audiences, Blonde Redhead made it seem oblique and exotic once again, rendering post-no-wave squall with a European art-house sophistication. ![]() Revisiting the two albums Blonde Redhead released on Smells Like, it’s easy to hear why Shelley was drawn to the band-and the reasons go beyond imitation-as-flattery. If Sonic Youth had come to view Nirvana as their baby band, Blonde Redhead were the NYC-bound foreign-exchange students-two Japanese women and a pair of Italian twins-who had their own peculiar interpretation of the host culture. But if the Smells Like name was a bit of a joke, then Blonde Redhead seemed to be the punchline, given that their music exuded a pungent whiff of Shelley’s main gig.
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