Blonde Redhead - Penny Sparkle

When asked to describe her eighth studio album, lead singer of Blonde Redhead Kazu Makino remarked: ‘I am not sure what ‘Penny Sparkle’ is but I hope I offered to them as much as they offered me’. She’d recorded something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and the experience is much the same for the listener.

It’s an album that follows ‘23’, released in 2007 and received as undoubtedly the most direct, hard-hitting album of the group’s career. It marked a significant sonic shift - it’s a trait of the band to never sit in the same place - transferring complex pop melodies from basements to stadiums; adding no-limit reverb and atmospherics to perfectly written songs. ‘Penny Sparkle’ does its best to present a more modest picture than before; it restricts itself in milking the poignant melodies for as much as they’re worth, instead exploring more subtle means in displaying them.

The dynamics of opener ‘Here Sometimes’ are an example of this: minimal, indirect, but capable of making itself a full-on pop song, a chart hit perhaps. The listener is required on all occasions to have patience and to sit down and involve with the record, instead of using it as a small part in daily routine.

With ‘23’ that was rarely the case with the same applying to ‘Misery Is A Butterfly’. The former needed no explanation; it was straightforward and didn’t need to be meaningful. The complexity and beauty of the latter invited the listener to persist and to truly understand the relevance of the album. ‘Penny Sparkle’ has neither of these attributes, thus making it difficult to persist with. It’s not without its streamlined pop (‘Not Getting There’, ‘My Plants Are Dead’) nor is it barren of smart songwriting, found on ‘Everything Is Wrong’ or album haunting closer ‘Spain’. But it’s not one of the other. All the more, the band don’t opt to make a significant change in their sound, as they’ve done on previous occasions. What I’m trying to say is, it quite simply lacks the appeal of its predecessors and worse; at times it lacks the songs.

In truth, it’s not merely difficult to define. It’s not simply a case of failing to find concurrent themes of messages. There’s an exclusivity in this album that’s hard to pierce through; it seems to have been an emotional, affecting experience for Makino but an experience that’s impossible to share or relate to. But quite crucially it remains a record of beauty. Views of sunsets or waves breaking on rocks; they’re not physical and they’re not something you can fully immerse yourself in, but they’re overwhelming and they have an impact. ‘Penny Sparkle’ is much the same, albeit not as dramatic. It’s not scarce of special songs or lush musicality but it lacks the intimacy of previous works.