by Anika Maculangan (@anika_maculangan)
Sometimes art is manifested in the toughest of times, when you find yourself at a crossroads. For Kazu Makino and twins Amedeo Pace and Simone Pace, the album Sit Down For Dinner was a child to darkness and hardship. The album came around during a period of trial and tribulation, when Amedeo had been dealing with Lyme disease and Babeosis, and Makino’s mother was grappling with dementia. In this momentary instance of suffering, they found refuge in creating music through the pain that tied and bonded them closer as a band. In between notes of this album, a boat in the middle of a clamorous ocean comes into view. This boat, burrowed deep in the waves, tries its best to keep itself afloat, despite the turbulence. Within a maintained balance, equilibrium is found. In this journey of tough love and existential unrest, Blonde Redhead paints a picture of melancholia in its spectacle, as it feasts in a ballroom of cathartic performance.
Sit Down For Dinner imposes itself as a hybrid that coheres the love letter and the eulogy, as it lingers on ruminations of passion and loss. This disposition is amplified by the songs’ vast stretches of echo paired with mellow washed-out intonations. The tracks’ buttery, satin-like vocals are a testament to this introspective soundscape, muddled with dreamy consonance and reflective harmony. Songs on this album such as “Melody Experiment” embody a kind of consciousness that takes after a wilted rose, or of billowing smoke, demonstrating a gradual burgeoning. Meanwhile, we also fall witness to certain tracks like “Snowman” which lean more toward incantations of isolation and alienation, when placed at the brink of unwanted solitude.
A similar temperament is observed in “Rest of Her Life,” which at its forefront, dwells on the expiry of life, whereas tracks like “Via Savona” are exposed to an effusively lush nocturne, which extend the sensations of a distant memory. With the band’s perceptive recipe for shoegaze and noise rock, harmonies collapse and subside into a transcendent, cabalistic void. Amongst this album’s charm for spacey heartache, is its ripened proclamation of unified distress. This misty wool gathering of agony is suspended in the album’s chime-ridden, orchestral quality. As the rhythmic tempo of the album delicately glides through humming accents of warm cadence and choral pulsing, the tracks make for a rich and soulful exploration of dynamics that border what may rather be considered ‘familial.’
From all of the intimations that surround the making of this album, one can profess the many brawls the band had to spar and lock horns with, in order to produce this collection of songs, but from endured adversity sprouts creative output that is sincere and genuine in its origin. Just from immersing one’s ear into this pool of emotive affectation, one would immediately come to notice the album’s thirst to reach out for more than what is already served on the plate. Through experimentation and tinkering around the genres, Blonde Redhead is able to designate itself with a new sound that oscillates from chamber-esque to synth-driven. For a lion’s share of this album, the band’s mystical allure is pronounced, prodding at the music’s abstrusely enigmatic aura. Considering the band’s multi-cultural roots, in its background of having hailed from Milan, Italy and Kyoto, Japan, one can regard their aptness for crossing dimensions and boundaries, done in true New Yorker spirit, which is where the band initially came into fruition back in 1993.
Ultimately, Sit Down For Dinner is an inspired, earnest project that will be what surmises the band’s coming-of-age within the musical sphere. As Makino mentions Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking as a point of reference upon the establishment of the album, we gain better clarity on what she means when having stated the notion of something uplifting being procured from a place of sorrow. The band takes all of their perils and turns them into something free of the past — like an old thrifted sweater, reworked and sewn into a newer, happier article of clothing, ready for its owner to comfortably wear.