[rating=3.50]
As someone who writes music reviews with some regularity, it is my good fortune to listen to a lot of music, in any number of genres. As such, I’m always amazed when a powerful group somehow manages to get to nearly 10 albums before I really notice them. Such is the case of Blonde Redhead, a talented trio who has been playing together since 1993. They only came to this writer’s attention (and that of a broader world, judging from chart numbers) with the 2007 release of 23¸ a gorgeous, sometimes intense album whose stand-out tracks include the eponymous “23,” a rocking song overlaid with Japanese singer Kazu Makino’s breathily beautiful vocals, and the perfectly aggressive “Spring and By Summer Fall,” which landed on the CBS series Numb3rs.
Happily, they have released a new full-length, Penny Sparkle, that is a perfect follow-on to their previous work. It is a continuing evolution of their trademark dark, brooding, and well-orchestrated psychedelic-rock, albeit with no track of the same intensity as “Spring and By Summer Fall.” Its release date is perfectly timed, because in many ways this album is a perfectly reflective album for the transition to fall and winter; it is an album by which to contemplate things of heady nature over a glass of something dark and swirling, a fire in the background, the wind howling outside. It is an album that pushes the listener to find a mechanism for uplift in sonically-downbeat mining of the human experience.
Standout tracks, to these ears, include the jazzy “Will There Be Stars,” “Oslo,” and the gorgeously depressing (while still poppy) “Everything is Wrong.”
