Concrete Playground

As the Laneway Festival approaches, it scatters in its wake a host of gorgeous sideshows. Some are well-known favourites while others are, if not completely unknown, a shade towards the obscure. Blonde Redhead is an example of the latter, a band most recently heard in Australia in the form of its epic pop romance 23, which hides an impressive discography stemming back sixteen years.

Spawned from New York-based noise rock, Blonde Redhead are singer/guitarist Kazu Makino and twin brothers Amedeo (singer/guitarist) and Simone Pace (drummer/programmer). Their sound is delayed champagne, full of reverbs and romantic synth, but with just the right stir of post-grunge bitters to stop the taste from cloying. Coupled with this is an aesthetic that wears nostalgia so casually that they may as well be fairy travelers from a yesteryear time.

Joining the trio for their only Sydney sideshow are New Zealand band, The Verlaines. Dropping away from the sweeping magic of Blonde Redhead, Graeme Downes and company create an earthier soundscape of witty melancholy marked with playful interludes of brass.