Music: Blonde Redhead

Italian twins plus a Japanese ex-art student? Hot. Turns out they're massively talented, too. Last night's show at Webster Hall blew my mind; we got there super early and consequently were only separated from the stage by one row of people. When Kazu stomped out on stage in ankle boots and short shorts and proceeded to stand right in front of me for the whole concert, I almost got a hard-on. She is beyond supermodel hot. Just look at her legs:

Now imagine the bottom half of them. So not only is she graced with a killer hot body, and an amazing soft, sweet, high voice, and some guitar and keys skills, and mad dancing abilities, but she is tender, too. Toward the beginning of the show, she saw a cluster of us holding our ears during parts of a song and at the end asked if it was too loud (there was drum machine that was cranked so that you not only felt the base vibrating through your solarplexus, but also a distinct pain in your ear that you felt compelled to protect yourself against), patiently interpreting our shouted remarks until diagnosing the problem and turning down the offending base.

The whole band, though, was incredibly generous and gracious; they did two encores, playing in total almost two hours, and though it was clear that they were exhausted, they kept going deeper and deeper into their zone. Kazu and Amadeo have an intense closeness and chemistry on stage, often playing face to face so that they're almost touching, and once she even reached out and pulled his hair in a tough, loving gesture of expression, and then she kicked him away. Most of the songs they played were off of the new album, 23, and their penultimate (my favorite) Misery is a Butterfly, including the title track and the great song Equus (which Kazu sang, more or less, to the seated horse sculpture they had on stage behind her keyboard, which she used throughout the show as a bench, caressing it's head and ears.)

Their opening act rocked hard enough to deserve a mention as well. The Fields are four British indie rock guys and a white-blonde Icelandic fraulein at the keyboards, and based on their hard-core rockage, I will definitely be checking out their debut album Everything Last Winter.