Blonde Redhead - 'Misery Is A Butterfly' (4AD)
4/5
By: Tim Dellow
The Italian necromantics return with a haunted house of an album, where the only cadavers are leaf skeletons, unbearably beautiful to look at, but more fragile than the wings of the 'Butterfly of Misery', that dissolves to the touch.
Blonde Redhead started out pushing the post-punk blueprint with an emotional scope way beyond Fugazi (whose Guy Picciotto returns to produce this album) over their first efforts in which guitars were pushed to their very limits in a cathartic mourning of the death of the US underground. In an attempt to reach a higher plain, the group ditched the guitars to create the astounding, moog-fuelled 'Melody for Certain Undamaged Lemons', but have returned to them for this, their first album for 4AD, applying their experimental findings to traditional instruments, dealing with them affectionately, distilling them through contemporary sophtware and classic songwriting.
The results are breathtaking; ghost stories which highlight how death governs the relationship between the body and soul - the conflicting aspects of humanity fore-fronting the transient nature of existence to create an eerie reminder of mortality.
As you wander through the dilapidated remains of a past, self-assured life, its ghosts walk through its walls, suggesting themselves as ever present beings that murdered for love and died of a broken heart.
This conceptual album avoids the contrived pretensions of 'concept' albums, aware that life, and death, never follow a linear narrative or single point. Instead, this is a multi-faceted exploration of existence, with the listener included as another phantom in the shell of life. Their subject-matter, it seems, will always remain an expression of the inexpressible.
Artists in this article: Blonde Redhead
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