Blonde Redhead - Misery Is a Butterfly
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.96 You Save: $8.02 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.02 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
|
|---|
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Free Music Notes for Misery Is a Butterfly
Free Music Review: Someone Please tell Amedeo not to sing!
Hit: 3 Stars
This could have been an absolutely AMAZING album. Unfortunately, it is
not. Blonde redhead is one of those bands where the vocal duties are shared. In this case, it is between Amedeo Pace (voice,words, guitar, baritone guitar) and Kazu Makino (voice, words, clavinet, guitar). Each of these individuals have very unique voices and a tendency for atonal, off-key lamenting. Kazu voice is unique and interesting in a way that seems that transcend its inherent limitations. Amedeo's voice, on the other hand, is just plain awful. It sounds like some random idiot singing in the shower- the voice of someone who thinks they can sing but cannot. It is nasaly, whiny, completely off-key (flat) and utterly irritating. If anyone thinks differently, they have let too many positive reveiws skew their perception of his flawed singing. This is a shame because this completely obliterates the otherwise fantastic instrumentation on the songs in which he sings. It is like listening to a beautiful melody with the teakettle whisting in the foreground - it isn't cool, artsy, or edgy...it is just ridiculously annoying. It almost sounds as though he is deliberately trying to sound as bad as possible. Contrary to what many of you hipsters may think, it is not cool, sexy, avant-garde, mysterious, or in any way interesting to sing like a tone-deaf wounded animal.
Let's review:
The instrumentation- very complex and beautiful.
Kazu's vocals- unique and somewhat atonal but very ethereal and complimentary to the instrumentation.
Amedeo's vocals- unique... as in uniquely bad. His voice greatly detracts from what would otherwise be a truly amazing record.
I truly hope that someone will eventually tell Amedeo that he cannot sing and that his vocals DESROY otherwise beautiful songs. Please let Kazu handle all of the vocal duties from now on. It is the attributes of her voice and the instrumentation that sell records.
Free Music Review: Perfect album title
Hit: 3 Stars
This is a melancholy album, with a rolling light electric guitar, light synth sound. The vocals are a distinguishing feature of this band. At first I thought it was a female singer on some songs and a male singer on other songs, but then I realized that, like the bizarre music group Danielson Famile, it's all a male singer, it's just that on some songs he sings in falsetto. Unlike Danielson Familie, the music on this album isn't bizarre. The mood of this album could be compared to some albums by The Cure. This album has a consistent, rolling, melancholy sound.
The title is a perfect description of this album. It's like a depressed butterfly, listlessly flying along, saying to itself, "I really need to be hitting some flowers, but I just don't feel like it. There's a flower...no, I don't feel like that one. How about that one? No, nothing looks good." And so the butterfly just keeps flittering around aimlessly. In fact, one of the songs is called "Misery Is A Butterfly," and in a different song, the words speak of a butterfly with broken wings.
Perfect for a cloudy, rainy, depressing day when you are pensive or just don't feel like doing anything.
Free Music Review: half and half
Hit: 3 Stars
This is the produced, orchestrated Blonde Redhead album, which they evidently never had the budget to create with Touch and Go. To some people this will be a really good thing, and to the others it will be bad, as evidenced by the reviews below.
The upshot, I guess, as pointed out elsewhere, is that listeners can stop comparing them to SY. I'm divided also, in that they should have made this a really put-together EP. The first 7 songs have a lot of content, and are really good, but thereafter, for me, the record seems to fall apart, and becomes almost unlistenable. Another thing which is totally detracting is the ongoing delineation of the bandmates' relationship. It's like some kind of rock drama which I'm just not into hearing about anymore.
Free Music Review: Disappoining offering from an otherwise great band.
Hit: 2 Stars
After Fake Can be Just as Good and Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, I was expecting better from Blonde Redhead. This is probably the most disappointing album of the year.
Whereas previous BR offerings were diverse in tone and approaches to songwriting, Misery Is a Butterfly sounds like the same song repeated again and again over the course of the album, ad nauseum. The biggest problem is that it sounds as if Blonde Redhead just discovered the harpsichord sound effect on their keyboards and they overuse it on the album. To say they overuse it is actually understating the point . . . they make that one keyboard sound the crux of the album, and the music suffers.
The one exception is the last song, "Equus," which MUST be an outtake from the sessions that produced the tracks for their last album (Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons). "Equus" infects you, but in a good way, and it's a brief moment of goodness on an otherwise overproduced, over-keyboarded, and underdeveloped album from an otherwise great band.
Free Music Review: Huge Disappointment
Hit: 2 Stars
I have to agree with pretty much everything that reviewer Dan Manning said about this album. This, to me, was the biggest disappointment of the year. BR is an incredible band. Their live performances have blown me away and I've loved every album that they made--until "Misery."
But "Misery" is an absolutely droll, even, yes, downright boring effort by BR. Virtually every song plods along at about the same speed. Further, "Misery" hides the guitars and drums way in the background--many of the songs are less like songs themselves than excuses to structure boring harpsichord loops and melodies.
I'm not calling this album a "sell out" or anything like that. I've got nothing but respect for BR and their long-time producer Guy Picciotto--one of the true hero's of indie rock.
IMO BR has finally laid an egg after a long string of gems.