Blonde Redhead
In An Expression Of The Inexpressible

"In an Expression of the Inexpressible" is a fitting album. Fitting in its content, fitting in its sound, fitting in its attitude. Even though in the end I still prefer "La mia Vita Violenta", this 1998 release sounds somewhat like the album of maturity for the New York combo: the watershed between the past and the future, the place where they do not yet dare to abandon the sonic outbursts of their beginnings, but simultaneously foresee the melodic turn of their future works.

Indeed, the ghost of Sonic Youth still lingers here and there, but the Pace brothers and the histrionic Kazu Makino are finally able to delineate, with technical skill and rightful inspiration, the coordinates of a sound sufficiently personal.

It's a fitting album, as I was saying, capable of encapsulating within itself the right mix of sounds and intuitions, and becoming inadvertently the agreeable album capable of reconciling the annoying pseudo-intellectual blow-uppian and the most unlucky of indie-rockers, while simultaneously representing a whole generation of "post" musicians still grappling with the arduous process of emancipation from the lessons of the genre's masters. It's impossible, unless you are the usual inescapable nostalgic of the early roughness, to find weak points in an album practically perfect, rightly intelligent, rightly emotional, rightly catchy, where the noise-rock of the beginnings peacefully coexists with the more melodic indie. Moreover, there’s that right touch of cunning avant-gardism that never sounds out of place, but rather makes us all feel cooler. Without forgetting either that right dose of metropolitan neurosis that makes for a young yeah yeah, nor that even more fitting dreamy evasive push that inevitably counterbalances it.

What more do you want? "In an Expression..." is the formidable fresco of a confused yet constructive youth, crushed by the contradictions of our time, but not so much so as to be compelled to divert to obscure tracks of nihilism. Rarely will you find yourself bored while listening to this album where everything is damnably in its place, in the right place, in the right proportion. And it is precisely in the dosage of ingredients that the work in question, a miraculous harmony between different and contrasting impulses, a hazy amalgam of frustrations, obsessions from bourgeois living rooms and providential emotional outbursts, undeniably reveals itself as successful. Wherever you find yourselves, be assured that Blonde Redhead will anticipate your needs, comply with your desires, and with such naturalness that in the end you really wouldn't accuse them of sycophancy: the full follows the voids, the voids follow the fulls, and when everything sounds excessively sweet, here you go scratching again in deconstructive involutions of shellackian memory. But the game isn’t as simple as it seems.

The opener "Luv Machine" is a bit emblematic of the Blonde Redhead of 1998: Kazu's hysterical meow, which between horny schoolgirl yelps and Eskimo whines will accompany us throughout the album, is the main dish of the evening, and never mind if poor Amedeo will see his vocal incursions drastically reduced. However, the two's guitars intertwine beautifully, and the bass, they say, isn't even there, although I think it is – we could start a forum about it. Finally, applause to good Simone, whose drumming, even though not excessively complex, accompanies with imagination and precision the sonic evolutions of the guitars, both where they, distorted, scratch our ears; and where, effected, they tease our brains: and where, arpeggiating, they lull us in passages of dreamy melancholy.

The sounds, then, are so polished as to highlight the most insignificant of details. Good, ultimately, the ability to synthesize and the ability to analyze. What more do you want? Granted, everything sounds a bit cerebral, inaugurating the progressive process of emotional cooling that will characterize the band in the future, but, in the end, what could you blame musicians who know how to play, have ideas, and evidently don't want to drown the fruit of their labor in deafening rivers of feedback for?

And then, once this marked tendency to meticulous control of sonic dynamics is accepted and understood, evidently at the expense of spontaneity, believe me, there really isn't time to be disappointed, not even being mean: if "10", with its stumbling electronic backing and assorted guitar whistles appears, for example, a bit artificial, there’s immediately the riff of "Distilled" to invest and intoxicate you with youthful verve, as if it was '91! "Missile ++", instead, will delight you with its irresistible simplicity, and if after a while you find Kazu's panting cloying, here comes the timely "Futurism vs Passeism part 2", an epic-visionary-dragging ride that sees Guy Picciotto (of Fugazi) on the microphone, also the album's producer, who launches into a suggestive spoken word in French.

And if on the contrary you feel nostalgia for Kazu's moans, here's the inevitable infantile regression of "Speed x Distance = Time": oblique arpeggios, bjork-like lullaby, and odd times. And when everything appears excessively syrupy, here's the title track to reveal Blonde Redhead's most audaciously avant-gardistic side: six minutes of obsessive post-adolescent neurosis based on stumbling drums, picks scraping the strings, and improbable vocal evolutions of the little Japanese girl, divided between the orgasms of a horny Lolita, the hysterical cries of a woman in labor, and the hallucinatory chanting of a post-modern ritual. But what is the "inexpressible"?, we might ask ourselves during the succession of these notes. Perhaps that damn desire to laugh and cry, to screw, brawl, to mess with ice cream and to kick your dog in the butt that seizes us all together and we don't know how to explain?

You, unkempt boy with a striped shirt, I know you understand me, as for the others, and especially all those who expect something entirely different from me, well, I can remind you that Death will not forget you. But today it's summer, let's put on our flip-flops and go to the beach. For one day let's forget about it. Tie!