Blonde Redhead | South China Morning Post

After 11 years, Blonde Redhead have fulfilled their potential for worldly, chic pop. When they caught the ear of Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley, great things were expected from the trio of twin Italian brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace and Japanese singer Kazu Makino.

After meeting at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, they slotted into New York's indie community. Most of their five albums sank in arty abstraction. Misery is a Butterfly, their first on the esteemed 4AD label, maintains the dreaminess but adds the odd glimpse of existential perspective.

This isn't the first review to say the album is cinematic. It's a wide but opaque screen of ghostly echoes and shifting focus. Imagine Sonic Youth jamming with Air and Portishead while listening to Byrds albums.

The song's narrators struggle to understand themselves and tell others to accept that you can know only so much about a person. They beg lovers to be patient with their flaws, asking if it's possible to be happy in a relationship when both partners know that they're alone.

The title track is a letter confessing love for Jane, while remembering how misery found them when they were together, spreading its wings to fly around their room before it 'asked for your gentle mind'.

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