Your tainted heart, my tainted love, repent now
Discordianism, the religion of chaos balancing order, holds that all events revolve around the number 23, providing you twist events enough to fit the schema. It is both an essential facet and a parody of numerology, anarchically knowing that if you twist anything enough it will fit wherever you want it to, but stating that this one is the true one, the only order in a chaotic religion in which everyone is Pope. Fitting things to the number 23 is a Fortean game, and it is largely what we as music reviewers do when approaching something vague, we build into it whatever schema we would like it ideally to fit.
Blonde Redhead are an avant-garde sort of musical act. Their earliest work is squelching noise-rock, heavily influenced by Sonic Youth, but recently they have consciously opted for quieter climes, shaping their discord and feedback into something more deliberate. In interviews they’ve said that they had no real direction for this album until it neared completion, that it is itself the process of its own making. The band had no real ideas going in, and worked together this dreamlike beauty. It is chaos somewhat ordered.
It is also a gentle sort of chaos. From the Loveless-referencing warped notes of the title track, the album has a vibe of throttled-forward movement riding on the air itself, great heights above the clouds. The word ‘love’ is tossed around a lot but these are not love songs, they are self-negating with messages of songs internally conflicting – ‘Don’t let the dress trick you, I love you less now that I know you’ is followed by ‘I won’t count the scars again because I do love you’ (“The Dress”). It is the personal made alien, “Heroine” is the incantatory stress of the inability to follow a loved one into death yet echoed with vocoder (possibly the prettiest use of the device I’ve ever heard), the utterly magical “Spring and by Summer Fall” seems to illustrate a desperate urge to know oneself through others, “Silently” is classic Motown filtered through synthetic distortion, about forgiveness and realizing a lover’s nature as separate from one’s own.
While I was initially put off by the album’s dreaminess, its smoothness, over time it has aggregated deep meaning and beauty, as with the grandiose rush of “Publisher” as it sweeps into the chorus or “My Impure Hair” with its swooning showers of notes in the background.
Don’t know what to make of that four-legged flapper with the tennis racket on the cover, though.
87% => ****1/2 —currently # 9 on my best of 2007 list—
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