I'm not quite sure how to put this, but after listening to Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons, I feel as if I like the idea of the band more than the band itself; perhaps another way of putting it would be to say that I like their sound more than their songs...but even that's not quite right - maybe another way again would be to saying that I like the various parts of their songs more than the songs as wholes, but that too doesn't really capture it.
This split response reflects my experience of the album, and of Blonde Redhead's music generally (or at least what I've heard of it to date). I love the sound, the shivery uneven refractive swoony cinematic fraughtness of it all. There's a very distinctive aesthetic at play, clattering yet pretty, stop-start in any given moment but ex-centrically oriented around a kind of guiding internal momentum, melodies seemingly dialed in from some other dimension, working its way through differently in the various individual songs. I can't really pick any 'best songs', because every one is really good...
Which is kind of 180 degrees from what I thought I was saying earlier, but maybe the best way of thinking about these two ways of expressing my thoughts is as two sides of the same coin. The tunes of these songs seem different from what I'm used to in pop music (even indie-type art-pop); structurally, too, the songs have an air of uniqueness to them. And that difference is what makes it problematic to think about Blonde Redhead's music in terms of 'songs', at least insofar as that presupposes comparison to more typical examples of the category (even though these obviously are pop songs, at least in some sense).
But in any case, it's really good.
