It feels reductive to dismiss Blonde Redhead as simply a shoegaze band. Over their 30-year existence, they’ve worked in Sonic Youth-indebted noise rock, psychedelic pop, French chanson, and dream pop, as well as dreamy, cinematic shoegaze. While shoegaze is often excellent for conveying a sense of romantic detachment or a psychedelic “continual derangement of the senses”, as Rimbaud puts it, shoegaze is often one of the most egregious examples of “style over substance,” where a thick shellac of special FX and studio gimmickry attempts to conceal a lack of songwriting and musicianship.
The difference is akin to a skilled auteur using studio trickery to make a story even more compelling, versus a Summer Blockbuster attempting to hide a complete lack of compelling characters, realistic dialogue, pacing, or plot behind a tsunami of CGI effects.
While Blonde Redhead are arguably one of the best shoegaze bands to have ever existed, they’ve never needed gimmicks to stand out. While Blonde Redhead have featured plenty of stylized production across their ten original studio LPs, their ringing, dissonant guitars, relentless rhythmic precision, and vocal interplay between Kazu Makino’s honeyed soprano and Amedeo Pace’s cedar-warm tenor are the engine driving Blonde Redhead for the last 30 years.
Any doubts about Blonde Redhead’s musical ability will be laid to rest on The Shadow of the Guest, a reimagining of 2023’s Sit Down for Dinner with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as well as a series of ASMR remixes. Instead of distorted guitars and burning mellotrons, Blonde Redhead rely on the dense polyphony of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus to create sensations of doubt, reminiscence, anticipation, and regret. It’s more Handel than Hum, with pure angelic voices taking the place of chorus, reverb, and delays.
On paper, it seems like The Shadow of the Guest has every opportunity to go deeply wrong. After all, isn’t it ostensibly a remix album featuring a children’s choir on a number of previously popular tunes? While there are plenty of good songs featuring children’s choirs, they can’t all be “Another Brick in the Wall” or “Cry Little Sister” from The Lost Boys. Some manage to pull off the innocent, idealistic feeling, but even more seem to convey a corny, hectoring “We Are the World” tone. It’s a tough needle to thread, taking advantage of the tonal possibilities of children’s voices without succumbing to sentimentality.
In Blonde Redhead, intent seems to have a lot to do with it. The Shadow of the Guest‘s origin had nothing to do with a cynical attempt to simply repackage Sit Down for Dinner songs to snag more plays. Instead, the project started as a lark between Kazu Makino and her close friend, the fashion designer Isabel Marant.
“The album started as a soundtrack that I produced for my closest buddy Isabel Marant’s fashion show. I often play her my early demos and things that I am making, and I told her I want to make ASMR using parts and fragments of our songs. It was such a great musical exercise for me. She came with me to the studio in Paris, wrote phrases in French, and we had a good laugh at my pronunciation. This is an important release for us. They are not just a rendition of the latest but a long-time dream that finally came true.”
Working with a choir also realized a longstanding dream. “Before”, from Sit Down for Dinner, was written with a choir in mind and told from a child’s point of view. Rather than being overly sweet or cloying, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus adds genuine musical interest, contributing harmony and counterpoint in real-time, fading in and out at unexpected times, giving a euphoric sense of anticipation and awe to “Before’s” otherwise introspective gaze.
The Shadow of the Guest feels like both a major and minor release. At just 36 minutes long, it borders on EP territory, and a remix EP at that. It’s this “minorness” that makes it such a notable release, though. You don’t get the sense that Blonde Redhead are chasing trends or trying to cash in on the next big thing. They’re simply following their instincts and making interesting, remarkably well-crafted music, regardless of genre.
<!–
–>