It’s difficult to know how to react when a music critic calls you part of “the world’s hippest hair band.”
When Simone Pace, one-third of the undeniably ubercool rockers Blonde Redhead, heard that a critic at the Tennessean wrote that, he seemed a bit taken aback. Understandable since Pace, his twin brother Amedeo and bandmate Kazu Makino are spending a lot of time touring behind their just-released album, “Penny Sparkle.”
“This is a crazy, exciting time,” Simone Pace said about the recent praise lavished on the band. “We have been around so long, though, I don’t know if you can think of it as a turning point.”
Still, the new album’s electronic sound — called “electro-indie-pop” by many — has brought even more popular and critical acclaim to the band that formed in 1993 when the Italian-born and Montreal-raised brothers joined with Japanese musician Makino in the underground New York music scene.
Although some musicians fret that changing their sound too much will leave fans in the dust, that’s not something the members of Blonde Redhead dwell on when they write and record.
“Of course we want people to love the record. There’s no doubt about that,” Pace said. “But if we start thinking about [the listeners when writing or recording a record], we will never know what we want. We have to believe in what we do first. We can’t let anything take us away from that focus.”
The secret, Pace said, always is to try to nudge your sound ahead and not fall back on what you’ve done in the past.
“We wanted to try something new and something that felt challenging,” Pace said of various collaborations that contributed to the new album. “The way I see it, it was almost like a collaboration. Not in the writing sense but in the production sense.”
That moved the band’s sound away from fully textured with plenty of layers to what Pace said “is more minimal so that every part is more essential.”
The energy translates into the shows, which also include special lighting to set a mood, much as one might see at an art show.
“The shows are really beautiful,” he said. “It’s the first time we’ve had a light show and it’s inspiring to me to have a visual aspect — it’s minimal and moody — added to the music.”
