TEAM LAST CALL

Over the course of its last three albums, New York’s Blonde Redhead has morphed from a Sonic Youth-ish garage outfit into an atmospheric art-pop band that marries My Bloody Valentine’s droning guitars with the immediacy and imagination of pre-weirdness Radiohead.
To translate that into radio lingo, imagine Björk covering Coldplay, and then imagine that you just took a fistful of Ecstasy and are being washed away in the disco lights of a smoky nightclub, and that’s what Blonde Redhead sounds like.
The band’s newest release, 23, picks up where 2004’s Misery Is A Butterfly left off – trading in some of the melancholy for a new and curious energy. It’s a real indie-rock stunner, driving but dreamy, dense but not overstuffed, and absolutely cinematic in scope.
“We love film and we love soundtracks. We listen to soundtracks when we write. There’s a beauty in being able to imagine certain things while you write music, imagine pictures, imagine scenery,” explains drummer Simone Pace. “It’s hard to explain because I feel like it’s something that we have in us. I think our music could very well be written for film.”
On 23, the band’s co-vocalists, wife and husband Kazu Makino and Amedeo Pace, trade off spooky, space-trance melodies that wade through thick curtains of guitar. It’s at once firmly melodic and loosely psychedelic. The songs are propped up by Simone’s peppy, off-kilter dance beats, which illustrate just how much influence Blonde Redhead has had on younger NYC bands like Interpol, the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
The album is about as close to a pop record as a band like Blonde Redhead can make without totally bastardizing its sound. The songs are “get-able” on the first listen, thanks in part to a more economical approach to song structure, but on my seventh time through the album I swear I’m hearing songs I’ve never heard before in my life.
According to Simone, who checked in with Team Last Call in mid-July, the songs on 23 are mostly the result of the band members trying to concentrate as much on form as they were on creativity.
“We have a lot of talks before we start writing, actually. We talk about what it is that we want to do with the new album and how different it should be from the previous one. What’s the next stage, the next step for the band?” he explains in a soft Italian accent. “But a lot of it you think you’re deciding, but a lot of it just happens unconsciously.
“With Misery, we made ourselves free and kind of accepted as many ideas as possible that we could put into the music. This record, we kind of just stopped ourselves from going to that place again,” he adds. “We wanted the record to be more direct, but also to leave more freedom for the listener to imagine – without giving him all of the things to listen to – certain things on his own terms, with his own ears.”
Blonde Redhead’s story is almost as compelling as the music itself. The members are an interesting, if not unlikely, match, and their meeting up is nothing short of serendipity.
Kazu was an art student who immigrated to America from Japan to experience a different culture. Amedeo and Simone are twins who were born in Milan, grew up in Montreal and moved to Boston to obtain jazz degrees.
The three met each other by chance in a New York City restaurant. Shortly after that meeting, Kazu began taking guitar lessons from Amedeo. Then they all started a band. Then Kazu and Amedeo got married. And now, 14 years later, all three members still live together in a New York apartment.
“I spend most of my time with a couple, you know, which – you can imagine what that’s like,” Simone says with a laugh. “You really have to understand the situation and be respectful of some boundaries. I’m very close to Amedeo, but it’s a struggle. It’s not an easy thing. But we have lasted for many years now. I think we have a pretty good handle on it.
“Sometimes I feel like, ‘Gosh, I wish I could have my girlfriend with me when I go away,’” he laments. “But I think the trick is to try to find your own place and be happy within that place, and without thinking that somebody else is better off.”
Blonde Redhead has been a critical darling since almost day one, and that’s more than likely the way the band will go down in history. Rocking 60,000 people at Coachella is about as close as they’ll ever get to being an arena act. That being said, the band has a fiercely loyal fan base around the globe of the kind of indie rock kids and art freaks that will stick around as long as the band does.
“We’re always thinking about, ‘How do we improve? How do we get better musically? How do we help our audiences grow?’ But it’s not like we’re in control of the situation,” Simone says. “But it’s a pretty organic way of approaching the whole thing. We have had a really slow growth, but it hasn’t really stopped. It’s been kind of gradual, and hopefully it will keep growing.”