Misery is a Butterfly (2004) Blonde Redhead

Written by Meenakshi Nirmalan

A friend of mine recently sent me Blonde Redhead’s album Misery is a Butterfly. I hadn’t listened to Blonde Redhead in around two years so was instantly transported back to memories of being in sixth form. When I was 17, I had two songs from Misery is a Butterfly on my writing playlist – the title track, along with Elephant Woman – as well as the band’s most famous track, For the Damaged Coda, from the album Melody of a Certain Damaged Lemon. Despite having the aforementioned three songs on repeat in 2022, I hadn’t listened to a full Blonde Redhead album until a few weeks ago and didn’t know too much about the band either. Released by the iconic record label 4AD, Misery is a Butterfly was written after Kazu Makino suffered a life-changing accident. Makino was thrown off a horse, which then trampled her. She underwent reconstructive surgery and spent a lot of time in respite, unable to sing. In an interview, Makino explained that what frustrated her the most about her accident was the aftermath; being unable to do what she loved for ages. Much of the album explores this journey, though I wasn’t aware of the backstory until after I listened to the whole album. 

Blonde Redhead are a 3-piece outfit, consisting of Kazu Makino, and twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace. The band went through a few bassists, but none of them stayed, so they continued making music as a trio. Misery is a Butterfly was produced by Guy Picciotto from Fugazi. Blonde Redhead have cited Fugazi as a strong influence on their style, with the two bands having toured with each other. We see this come across in Blonde Redhead’s distinct style: dark yet delicate, blending art-rock with noisy shoegaze. Elephant Woman has always captivated me. The title is suave and the track opens with the gentle plucking of guitar strings. It’s softly ethereal and potentially my favourite track on the album. The track’s title alludes to a David Lynch film, entitled Elephant Man (1980), which follows the life of a man living with a facial disfigurement. With my knowledge of the context, I now hear the song in a different light. The lyrics are unequivocally about Makino’s accident: ‘Elephant girl, it was an accident, unfortunate / Angel threw me like a rubberman aiming for the ground’. The soundscape is dreamy; Makino’s voice is light and airy. Elephant Woman has an other-worldy ambience – a steady tempo, synths and the hypnotic strums of the guitar. As the track progresses, you hear single, angular plucks of strings, embellishing the sound. The sound is incredibly pretty; even with the lyrics, most listeners would be unaware, like I was, that Elephant Woman is about a traumatic event.

The outro, Equus, also directly explores Makino’s accident. Prior to reading Makino’s story, I always assumed that the title was a nod to Peter Schaffer’s play, also titled Equus, wherein a psychiatrist attempts to treat a horse-obsessed boy. Makino sings: ‘Sometimes I think I might just let you be / Let you be a horse / All I want is to be a rider, to be a part of you’. Of course, I’ll never fully know what Equus is about; I’ll never fully understand how Makino felt after her accident. With this being said, I don’t think that responses to trauma can be anything other than multifaceted. You feel a range of emotions and oftentimes, these feelings can be contradictory. Equus seems to explore acceptance. Through singing ‘let you be a horse’, Makino acknowledges that her accident was just a result of her horse’s individual temperament; it became spooked and violently threw her off. There is nothing anyone could’ve done to engineer a different outcome. Makino’s decision to let go and move forward does not undermine the amount of pain she was in. The song is upbeat, with the drums propelling the song forward. The chorus is snare-heavy, but the soundscape is stripped back in the bridge. Here, the bass drum sounds metronomic, resembling the steady trot of a horse, letting the guitar resonate.

The title track, Misery is a Butterfly is beautiful. Droney synths gel the song together, creating an eerie ambience. The synths have always reminded me of the intro to Lux Aeterna, from the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack. Makino’s vocals are as heavenly as ever, singing ‘Misery is a butterfly / Her heavy wings will warp your mind / With her small ugly face and her long antennae / And her black and pink heavy wings’. It’s curious how the band takes a butterfly - a classically beautiful image - and presents this as something perverse, yet complex. Here, the butterfly is something to be cautious of; it’ll ‘warp’ you, it’ll distort you. The different interpretations of what the ‘butterfly’ could symbolise, are just as elusive and impossible to pin down as the image itself. The image strikes me as akin to the volatility of a butterfly after it emerges from the cocoon. It’s new, it’s unpredictable, and this change is unnerving. Doll is Mine is similarly haunting. Misery is a Butterfly depicts the stress of feeling out of control, whereas Doll is Mine explores the inverse: the suffocating nature of control - both being controlled and the need to be in control perpetually. Lately, I’ve found dolls unsettling. They uncannily resemble humans, albeit a more aesthetically ideal version of the human form. Imperfections are erased and assets are enhanced. Moreover, the power dynamics between the doll and its owner are explored - ‘Why a doll? So they tell me / ‘Cause she’s mine / Faith and fully mine’. We never see the doll’s perspective, only the speaker’s, in a display of complete submission and obedience.

The struggle between transformation and stagnancy can be seen across the whole album. In Falling Man, Pace sings: ‘Try to reimagine me / And I’ll reinvent myself’ and also, ‘If you start doubting me / Then I start to doubt myself’. To me, this underlines the feeling of looking outside of yourself for direction. You know you can’t stay stagnant, yet do not know which direction to take. You want to grow, but have no idea what ‘growth’ looks like to you. Moreover, the guitar strikes a perfect balance between crispness and distortion. The soundscape is colourful but not overcrowded – a real merit of this album. The track Magic Mountain is arguably a reference to Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, wherein the protagonist, Hans Castorp, is supposed to stay with his cousin for a couple of weeks in a Swiss sanatorium. Castorp ends up staying for years. Makino sings: ‘At Magic Mountain / Nothing changes / Everything stays the same’: at the sanatorium, time appears to pass differently. The patients don’t have the same structure and routine as ‘the real world.’ Blonde Redhead don’t use a standard rock beat on this track; the percussion is intermittent, only featuring in the middle of the track. Misery is a Butterfly is an elusive album - introspective, filled with pain, underlining that struggle and growth are intrinsically tied to each other. There’s anguish in struggle, but also the beauty in the growth that follows, sonically reflected by fluctuations from dreamy to dark, often without warning.