New York's Blonde Redhead is an excellent reminder of what made "indie" rock independent in the first place. Trying to pin them down, to encapsulate their music in a pithy phrase or two is, to quote the title of their fourth album, like trying to give "an expression of the unexpressible."

Which may be why many reviewers have focused on the fairy tale: A beautiful Japanese girl meets an equally beautiful Italian boy. They become romantically intertwined. With his identical twin brother, they make beguiling, challenging music with poetic lyrics in which the band's personal history is transformed into art.

But the reality, glimpsed at in an early-morning phone call to the group's shared apartment in New York, is slightly less glamorous. They are recovering from their recent trip to Italy. Singer and guitarist Kazu Makino is still jet-lagged and a bit under the weather. Her partner and male counterpart, Amedeo Pace excuses himself to cook for her. Drummer Simone Pace is elsewhere, unmentioned.

Since Blonde Redhead's inception in the early 1990s, it has created a distinct musical idiolect -- a meld of Amedeo and Kazu's dissonant guitars and Simone's stuttering, syncopated beats. Due to their lyrics, strange guitar tunings and Lower East Side address, however, comparisons to Sonic Youth are inevitable and so frequent as to become a cliche.

Admittedly, the band has benefited from Sonic Youth's patronage. Steve Shelley, Sonic Youth's drummer, put out their first two albums, and the two groups have toured together.

But one needs to look another generation back, to the fractured rock of 1970s no-wave groups like Arto Lindsay's DNA (whose song title provides the band its name) or to experimental music composer Glenn Branca's guitar "orchestras" to begin to fully reconstruct Blonde Redhead's musical lineage.

The twins' time at Boston's Berklee College of Music -- as well as the presence of Fugazi's Guy Picciotto in the producer's chair -- help explain their rhythmic complexity. Their guitar sound owes as much to Gang of Four or the slash-and-burn guitar of Steve Albini (best known now as producer for Nirvana and the Breeders but originally the front person for seminal post-punk group Big Black) as to Sonic Youth.

The band has evolved somewhat from their noisier roots, but every song still has an element of experimentation, a sense of seeing how much creativity can be wrested from the standard rock-band format.

"It would be difficult to write two albums that would be the same," says Amedeo. "Change is very important when making art."

That said, on their fifth and latest album, "Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons," they have shaped their experimental instincts into their closest approximation of standard rock songs. Each track is distinct, yet the album has a flow to it that critics have compared to "Abbey Road."

Whereas on previous records, Blonde Redhead gave free reign to their more chaotic tendencies, "Melody" has an elegant restraint. Amedeo's guitar sounds urgent, biting at the bit; Kazu's voice is softer, less attenuated. Like a T.S. Eliot poem, the passion of the lyrics is tamed by the greater structure of the music. They are obscure, often poetic despite themselves. Their English -- gleaned from ESL textbooks, art films and late-night conversation -- is threaded through the plummy vowels of Italian and the staccato rhythms of Japanese.

"Foreign language allows me to have a little distance between me and my words, which makes it easier to talk about intimate things," says Kazu. "For example, try to say aloud the word 'penis' in public in many different languages. You'll find it a lot more difficult to say it in your own."

Kazu hails from Kansai, but Blonde Redhead have had a relatively low profile in Japan, a side effect of the music press's difficulty in pigeonholing them. "Melody," recorded in 2000, has just been released here, along with a substantial portion of the group's back catalog. Their upcoming gigs in Tokyo and Osaka represent only their second tour of Japan.

"Japan is a really hard place for us [to break into]," says Kazu. "Each band or genre seems to represent a lot. It means so much more than music."

Like their music, the group itself is difficult to define. Kazu is characteristically ambiguous when discussing the past, and though the band has been together nearly 10 years, their biography is a few brief lines.

"I feel uneasy talking about the past because I'm not really sure what I was doing," says Kazu.

Their lyrics, however, provide tantalizing glimpses. Listening to the two stand-out cuts on "Melody" -- "Hated Because of Great Qualities," sung by Kazu, and "Loved Despite Great Faults," sung by Amedeo -- feels like almost eavesdropping on a private conversation. And then there's the song "This is Not." Does the story of a girl who "left everything and traveled to the other side of the world," where "life was like a dream" until she "met you and your brother," sound familiar?

Music journalists' curiosity about the group's private life seems to be only acerbated by the band's reticence to talk about it.

"We just want to speak about our music in interviews rather than our private lives," explains Amedeo. "Some interviewers have a hard time accepting it. When you have a band or any kind of close relationship in your work, there is a lot of working out to be done. There has to be an order for it to work and last."

But just as a person's life can be changed by a chance meeting in a restaurant, one senses that Blonde Redhead's music is as much the result of happenstance as it is planning.

"It's not so much in your control," says Kazu. "You never feel like its your creation. You happened to walk by and pick it up."

"Music has its own life and, as an outsider, we need to be prepared for it," adds Amedeo. "I think that that is what makes it so strange and liberating and often difficult."

On "Hated Because of Great Faults," Kazu sings: "These are different matters. These are uncertain feelings. These should never be discussed here." Maybe this is the way to approach Blonde Redhead. Perhaps the key is not to over analyze, not to think too much, but instead, to listen.