Sit Down for Dinner is a pandemic album by and thru, from its protracted, piecemeal recording course of—spanning a number of seasons, a number of studios, and at the least two continents—to its overwhelming sense of stressed stasis. With life all of the sudden on pause, Makino was drawn to Joan Didion’s The Yr of Magical Considering, a meditation on her husband John Gregory Dunne’s deadly coronary heart assault at their dining-room desk in December 2003. On this mild, the phrase Sit Down for Dinner is much less an invite than a menace, and the duality of the sentiment is manifest in Makino’s two-part title-track suite, a hypnotically wistful ballad that upshifts abruptly into an accelerated drum-machine exercise. “Sit down for dinner/And the life as you already know, it ends/No pity,” Makino sings, quoting Didion in a tone so matter-of-fact it appears like a cruel taunt. However as she skates atop the tune’s icy-electro rhythm, the road turns into extra of a seize-the-day manifesto—dying can come for you at any second, so that you would possibly as effectively get your rocks off when you can.
Although it goes a protracted approach to reinstating Blonde Redhead’s singular mystique and impressionistic aura, Sit Down for Dinner is distinguished by an easygoing melodicism that, even in its darkest lyrical depths, makes it the warmest and most welcoming report within the band’s catalog. The place this band’s albums sometimes replicate the multicultural mosaic and avant-garde pedigree of their New York homebase, the elegant, spectral folk-rock of “Not for Me” bathes itself in a breezy West Coast ocean mist that blurs the road between ’70s gold and ’80s dream-pop. And by no means earlier than has this band tried one thing as unabashedly blissful as “I Thought You Ought to Know,” a slow-burning gospel-delic hymn that greets you with open arms and leads you down the trail that connects the Velvets to Mazzy Star.
However the place these contributions from Amedeo favor a extra direct, open-hearted method, Makino’s voice stays an enigmatic and beguiling instrument, investing songs like “Kiss Her Kiss Her” and “Earlier than” with equal doses of surprise and weariness. Tellingly, simply as they did 23 years in the past on Melody for Sure Broken Lemons, Blonde Redhead shut Sit Down for Dinner with one other arresting quasi-instrumental, “By way of Savona,” that showcases Makino’s echoing incantations, however this hardly appears like some calculated ploy to piggyback on these “Broken Coda” clicks. Moderately, “By way of Savona” is an enveloping ambient symphony that, relying in your vantage, may very well be an indication of Blonde Redhead’s inventive rebirth or a requiem for his or her attainable demise. Whereas within the midst of constructing this report again in 2020, Makino informed an interviewer she anticipated it might be “most likely the final album we make collectively.” She might have had a change of coronary heart since then, however ought to that prediction show right, Sit Down for Dinner is the coda this band deserves.
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