Blonde Redhead

Blonde Redhead comprise Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone and Amadeo Pace. They're that rarest of things: a band whose voice has grown stronger, clearer and more distinctive with every record that they have made. Their reward for this has been an audience whose numbers have quietly grown over the course of their career, almost entirely by word of mouth.

The band's unique sound - combining spare otherworldliness and bittersweet tension - can be traced back to their earliest releases in the mid-'90s. At the outset of their career, these characteristics were perhaps outweighed by a stridency and an impulsive abrasiveness inspired by the no-wave explorations of Downtown NYC and the refusenik spirit of Washington DC's Dischord roster. But Blonde Redhead's command of oblique melody and interest in textural experimentation started to flower more confidently when the band signed to Touch And Go. A broader range of influences started to have their effect on the music, and the trio's artistic progress was triumphantly confirmed by the appearance, in 2000, of Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons.

Although this record slipped almost invisibly past the music press, it did inspire devotion bordering on zealotry among its listeners. Melody… went on to sell more than 50,000 copies in the States alone, and like a handful of other records that managed to redefine what a post-punk band was capable of expressing (Slint's Spiderland springs to mind), it now enjoys a confirmed place in the pantheon of American underground rock music.

Something of an achievement, given that none of the band are American. The Pace brothers moved from Milan to Montreal as teenagers, while Kazu relocated from her home town of Kyoto in the early '90s to study in New York, which is where the band initially formed and where all three still live.

In 2003, Blonde Redhead delivered their first record for nearly four years shortly afterwards. It was instantly obviously that Misery Is A Butterfly was as much of a creative leap forward from Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons as that record was from its predecessors. The trio's gently mournful economy of style was adorned by a cinematic breadth of instrumentation. The rich depth of the arrangements created a striking and convincing unity of purpose. Nothing was straightforward or unfiltered by imagination - Kazu and Amedeo's wonderfully nuanced singing allowed the emotion in the songs to slip out surreptitiously, almost secretly, while Simone's drumming was a parade of deft inflections throughout.

Misery Is A Butterfly became the most successful album of Blonde Redhead's career, outselling Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons in the USA and greatly expanding their audiences in the rest of the world. The band will perform at Osheaga on Saturday September 8th 2007!

www.blonde-redhead.com