Blonde Redhead live at Music Hall of Williamsburg

Filed Under: Live Shows — By: Oliver Bouchard

The thing with Blonde Redhead is that they have been around for 21 years, since 1993. That is long before the Internet became mainstream and even longer before anybody could think of how technology would change music and the rest of the world. Much of the the audience (Elke and me included) on Tuesday at the Music Hall of Williamsburg seemed to be from that time as well: it has been a long time since I last saw to few smartphone screens held in the air. Musically, on the other hand, Blonde Redhead has never stood still: they grew out of the noisy guitar rock made popular by Sonic Youth in Downtown Manhattan into an art rock band with an itch to experiment and change, not unlike Radiohead.

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On stage they remain a three piece, with Simone Pace on drums and Kazu Makino and Amadeo Pace doing both vocals and various instruments, including a digital Mellotron and a six-string bass. That creates a dynamic in the show by itself and it was interesting to see how they switch and swap their instruments to produce the various music styles they have created over the years.

With nine albums they have a large œvre to draw from: the majority of the songs was of course coming off their latest album Barragán, but to my surpise, their 2004 record Misery is a Butterfly came in as a second (if I counted correctly). 2010’s Penny Sparkle, their most electronic release so far, was only represented with a special version of *Here Sometimes close to the end and their earlier, noisier work was not represented. Thus, the more she show progressed, the more nervous grew the audience about their personal favorites being omitted. But there is only so much they could pack in a show and for me, personally, I just wanted to hear 23, in my opinion one of the best songs ever made. Not surprisingly, I got my wish granted as the last song of the encore.