Blonde Redhead – “23″ (2007)

I’ve been looking forward to “23″ a lot but was a little worried about the involvement of Alan Moulder, responsible for some of the most generic productions of his day, said day being largely the late eighties/early nineties – shoegazer central, in other words. My first listen seemed to confirm my worst fears. Everything that marked Blonde Redhead off as a something different from the mainstream of the hazy dream-pop crowd seemed to have been buffed away. Title track “23” wafted in on a hazy of generically skittering beats, gleaming washes of guitar and Kazu’s high, just-this-much-short-of-a-squeak vocals. What followed seemed nice – the odd track stood out and I liked the electronic touches and flashes of white noise, the male vocals seemed much less irritating than on previous records – but it all seemed a little bit too easy.

Then I listened to it on shuffle by accident and it suddenly seemed like a different record.

The problem, I think, isn’t so much the production as the sequencing – there’s a clutch of perfectly marvelous pop songs, with a lot more dissonance and jagged edges than one might at first suspect but the record as whole is mixed and ordered so as to seemingly efface itself as much as possible. But start off with “Spring and Summer Fall” which marries a joyous pop hook with a classic Sonic Youth pulsebeat and some nifty harmonies and the record, despite the gauzy mix, kicks off in a whole new way. “Publishers” programmed beats and duet-style interactions between Kazu and Amadeo are lushly entrancing. “Heroine” is less of a progression from “Misery is a Butterfly”, sounding more like polite chamber pop than anything else. “Dr Strangelove” features Kazu at her most Gallic and affecting, though the arrangement seems to feature a disturbing amount of cowbells. “The Dress”, with it’s zither arpeggios and heavy breathing takes what could be an overly precious moment into three minutes of quiet menace and suspense.

So. Much better than a disaster then but not the headrush it might have been. It is, in fact, a very 4AD sort of record but not necessarily in a bad way. Think 60s cult movie soundtrack music, Jane Birkin and the Sonic Youth of “NYC Ghosts and Flowers” (look, that’s a much better record than everyone thinks it is). Oh, and produced by Alan Moulder. I’ve ended up listening to it a lot. Maybe I’ll even learn to live with the original running order one of these days.

Website – lots of Flash, of course. Very 4ad, y’know. The inevitable MySpace page.