Sit Down for Dinner

Album review

Nearly 30 years into a career that's moved on and off the fringes of the indie underground, Blonde Redhead continues to delight with their thoughtful approach to highly textured melodic pop. While Sit Down For Dinner is technically the band's follow-up album to 2014's sleepy-sounding Barragán, the intervening near-decade saw two notable things happen for the band. The first was the Masculin Féminin box set, which collated their earliest releases, and then there was 2019's release of Adult Baby, a solo album by guitarist/vocalist Kazu Makino. These releases helped foster the idea that Blonde Redhead was done as a band. Instead, they seemed to revitalize them. Sit Down For Dinner certainly doesn't find the band returning to their noisy roots or even the high-impact shoegaze of their mid-career era, but it seems as though there was a conscious effort to move away from the spare, icy whispers of Barragán. That said, for the most part, Dinner still works around a similar set of loping, midtempo grooves; it's much less minimalist in its approach, evoking the warm, diaphanous sounds associated with the band at its peak. While one would struggle to ever call a Blonde Redhead song "space rock"—the vocals of Makino and Amedeo Pace are far too distinct for interstellar hypnosis—there is a spaciousness to cuts like "Kiss Her Kiss Her," "If," and "I Thought You Should Know" that gives the album a sense of textural richness that's certainly welcome. The thematic centerpiece here—a title track split into two distinct parts—is a great example of the creative energy still at play with Blonde Redhead; the first part is all dreamy ambience with Makino's near-spoken-word lyrical delivery demanding the listener's attention, while the second part unfolds into a rhythm-driven pop number that bears little resemblance to its predecessor beyond the echoes of a keyboard figure that persist throughout both. And although there's a good deal of middle-age melancholy coursing through the material here, it's nonetheless exciting to see the band still finding ways to experiment with and evolve their sound. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz