After an abnormally long wait, Blonde Redhead took the stage at the Paradise Rock Club Sunday night backed by an ambiance fitting the New York art-rock trio’s look. It set the stage like a dream, with swirls of color and sound that seemed to be created from the surrounding atmosphere. Gliding onstage without a word of introduction, the band began its set, capturing the audience in a state that often left them too stunned to react or applaud.
Blonde Redhead’s heavy use of keyboard and drum samples maintained their cerebral, pleasantly dissonant studio sound, adding a sonic middle ground typically absent from live shows. The band took cues from these samples throughtout its performance, evidence of the meticulous production value behind their shows, and maintained throughout their performance.
Their older songs wore reflections of their newer work, shown by the harder edge of their guitars and the seemingly impromptu noise breakdowns prevalent throughout the set. Although hardly a detractor from their studio work, the majority of the band’s songs found a near seamless blend of instruments and vocals, recalling My Bloody Valentine’s immaculate Loveless and bands of the shoegaze era in general. As a result, their songs became one whole work, an individual entity rather than the sum of their parts.
On “23,” the title track of their new album, guitarist Amedeo Pace managed to replicate and enhance the swirling, amorphous guitars of the studio track, giving them a near tangible weight, aided in part by the unique acoustics of the Paradise. Their performance became an exploration in sonic presence, further supported through their use of a baritone guitar. Switching off between songs, Pace and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Kazu Makino bridged the gap typically filled by a bassist with the baritone, allowing them to play heavy bass notes and light guitar leads simultaneously.
Makino’s lyrics struck with a delicate poignance, pushing her voice to near breaking on “In Particular” and nailing the piercing strain of “Equus.” Her voice drifted through songs, a counterpoint and near-perfect compliment to Pace’s equally haunting vocals.
Not to be outdone, Pace matched Makino in intensity, lunging across stage with true rock-star abandon to punctuate chords and delivering his vocals with a clear determination, as if physically pushing his songs to their conclusion. Pace drove through “Melody of Certain Three” with a nonchalance typical of Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, delivering his lyrics in a monotone that felt like forward motion and seemed to run most of Blonde Redhead’s more mellow songs through a decaying tube amp, turning them into overwhelming walls of sound.
After leaving the stage as humbly as they had appeared, the band returned to perform a four song encore, drawing from “23,” “Misery is a Butterfly” and “Melodies of Certain Damaged Lemons.” The twenty minutes of adrenaline-fueled noise solos ended as abruptly as it began. With a timid “thank you,” bows and air-kisses, Blonde Redhead walked offstage.