The longer you watch Blonde Redhead onstage, the more you are irretrievably sucked into its universe. It’s impossible to take your eyes off singer/keyboardist Kazu Makino (originally from Japan) and Italy-born/Montreal-raised twin brothers Amedeo and Simone Pace on guitar/vocals and drums, respectively.
For a three-piece, with some pre-recorded bass and keyboard material, Blonde Redhead gets a noisy, room-filling sound that bears an occasional resemblance to Sonic Youth. Steve Shelley, SY’s drummer, produced the trio’s early work and released it on his Smells Like label. Over subsequent albums on Touch And Go and now 4AD, the band has achieved a dreamier sound. Both elements were in play tonight.
Even if you didn’t know that Blonde Redhead’s name came from a tune by no-wave combo DNA, its transplanted New York roots are undeniable. Although it’s been almost 30 years since the heyday of the second great wave of NYC art-rock bands that followed in the wake of Television, Talking Heads and Richard Hell & The Voidoids, Blonde Redhead somehow seems to be time-traveling contemporaries of the Bongos, the Feelies and the Bush Tetras.
It’s the spooky, impossibly high-pitched vocals of Makino that indelibly stamp Blonde Redhead as a bona fide original. She sings in a quavery, stratosphere-scraping range unheard since the glory days of Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations and Curtis Mayfield. Makino seems fully recovered now from the horseback-riding accident that broke her jaw sometime after the release of their 2000 album, Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons, a harrowing spill that found her trampled by the horse. Whether she (or Amedeo, who sings about a third of Blonde Redhead’s material) performed any songs in Italian, French or Japanese tonight was difficult to tell. As with all great rock bands, it would make no difference if they were singing in a language that only a Star Trek fan would recognize. They are that good.
—Jud Cost
