The next-to-the-last song on Blonde Redhead’s new album, Barragán, is titled “Penultimo”. Since when have Blonde Redhead been so literal? Since 2010’s Penny Sparkle, if we’re being honest, a lackluster album that traded in the trio’s lush, fathomless mystique for little more than a cellophane wisp of no-calorie beauty. It sparkled, and that was about it. Four years have passed since then, and while it may be perfectly reasonable to expect the group responsible for entrancing albums like Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons to return to form at some point, that point is not reached on Barragán.
Calling Barragán halfhearted would be giving it too much credit, both effort-wise and emotion-wise: it’s a cold fish of a record, dead-eyed and clammy. Singer/guitarist Kazu Makino has always kept her voice solemn and controlled, but the sense that there's something vast being held behind that mask is gone. "The One I Love” is about as compelling as tears plopping into a bucket, a hollow exercise in vague, impressionistic storytelling set to an limp art-pop track of acoustic guitars and flutes. “She does nothing all day/ But sit down and cry,” Makino chants like a bored chorister. The ennui is so on-the-nose, it’s oppressive.
The album is stubbornly unassertive. “No More Honey” is the closest Barragán comes to featuring a flesh-and-blood song, but lead guitarist Amedeo Pace’s swells of My Bloody Valentine-like riffage are kept on a short leash, then quickly shooed away. Ambient noises are sprinkled throughout—birds, what sounds like a typewriter, echoes of echoes with no discernable source—but they serve no purpose other than punctuating the emptiness of the music surrounding them. It’s a recurring theme, but one without a point—unless, as with the shuffling, exhausted-by-its-own-existence “Penultimo”, Blonde Redhead are trying to write songs that are featherweight and leaden at the same time.
Blonde Redhead began dabbling in electronic sounds on 1998’s “Missile + +”, and they go down a similar path on two Barragán tracks, “Dripping” and “Mind to Be Had”. Neither use those icy pulses to decent effect; the former teases with glimpses of ghostly melody without fully coming into focus, and the latter is a nine-minute slog of ping-ponged monotone. “Defeatist Anthem” sums it up best: Makino coos and sighs expectantly, and for a second, it seems like something—anything—might take flight. Then it just squirms in a circle of listless prettiness. “We wanted to make something timeless and pure, and perhaps a little minimalist too,” drummer/singer Simone Pace recently said in an interview. Instead of timeless, though, Barrágan is static; instead of pure, it’s blank; instead of minimalist, it’s stingy.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Blonde Redhead’s second single, “Vague”/“Jetstar”, their first for Steve Shelley’s Smells Like Records imprint. Accordingly, the single sounded a lot like Sonic Youth, from its soft, discordant buildup to its cyber-psychedelic climax. The band went on to master that nervy dynamic, and many others, during their late '90s/early '00s peak. They effortlessly recontextualized avant-rock, electro-pop, shoegaze, and white noise. Their back catalog is a deep well of potential to draw from, and it's enough to make you wish that Penny Sparkle had only been a fluke. Four years later, though, all Blonde Redhead has to show for its lengthy studio hiatus is another too-obvious bauble.
