The Blonde Redhead of Masculin Feminin—which came before the Blonde Redhead of Misery Is A Butterfly, and 23, and all their later work—were a spiky Blonde Redhead, an abrasive Blonde Redhead, a more challenging and confrontational band. The early recordings collected on Masculin Feminin remind me a whole lot of early Liars—punky, weird as hell, tons of energy, crazy experimentation. This box set is massive and includes Blonde Redhead’s first two albums plus a bunch of outtakes, live cuts, and demos. It’s always interesting to see the trajectory of bands, like Blonde Redhead, who start off with a more noisy, experimental aesthetic, and then, over time, move towards pop, towards sweeter melodies, towards something calmer and (arguably) more focused (Animal Collective comes immediately to mind as an example). Why is that such a common arc for artists, I wonder? Without doing any research, I’d posit that that sort of aesthetic movement (from avant-garde→mainstream) occurs more often than the reverse (although there is a word, via Thomas Mann, for the artist who is more experimental as he or she grows older: Greisen-Avantgardismus). I don't need an answer to this question, but I would like one.[BUY Masculin Feminin]