AEM013 Normal Love

Since drop­ping on Philadelphia’s thriv­ing exper­i­men­tal music scene in 2006, these vir­tu­osos have already com­piled a beefy resume. A grant from the Amer­i­can Com­posers Forum, a slot at John Zorn’s The Stone, legions of fist-pumping fans. But the real accom­plish­ment comes in the form of their music. Nor­mal Love packs an incred­i­ble amount of musi­cal diver­sity into their com­po­si­tions, mak­ing the cliché of post­mod­ern pas­tiche too weak a descrip­tor. Plus, we’re not talk­ing about some guy hud­dled over a lap­top and drop­ping nostalgia-bomb after nostalgia-bomb by just glitch-quilting his whole record col­lec­tion. Nay, we’re talk­ing real art­ful syn­the­sis of deli­ciously obscure influ­ences, from death metal to satanic funk to West African min­i­mal­ism to…um…the boss music from Contra.

A-side “Severe Con­fec­tion” draws heav­ily from the interval-hopping style of bourgeois-shocking dis­so­nance. If it isn’t seri­al­ism, it’s damn close. Also worth not­ing is that “Con­fec­tion” was penned by Dustin Hurt, brains behind the excel­lent Philadel­phia exper­i­men­tal music non-profit Bower­bird. If you’re tired of grind­ing, atonal chords and a total abuse of the met­ri­cal form, I hear you. But it’s the gen­tle shift of pre­dictable expres­sive forms that saves this band from same­ness. Take mid­point of “Severe Con­fec­tion.” After sev­eral min­utes of rhyth­mic acro­bat­ics with notes prac­ti­cally suf­fo­cat­ing the aural space, a preg­nant pause emerges, almost awk­wardly bare. For a moment, you think they’ve clev­erly pulled the plug, given us the ol’ get’em when they least expect it. And then, ris­ing out of the silence, a slowly grow­ing chord of male voices, groan­ing more than singing, and then—wham! Three more min­utes of skronk. A severe con­fec­tion, indeed.

It’s moments like that that make Nor­mal Love easy to, well, love. You can mar­vel at their tech­ni­cal prowess (which is, to say the least, daunt­ing) or the jaw-dropping com­plex­ity of their com­po­si­tions, but you’ll be miss­ing the whole pic­ture. As bassist Evan Lip­son once put it, “every­body always comes up to us after shows and are like, ‘Whoa what was that chord you guys were play­ing? Was that a [insert very aca­d­e­mic chord]?’ But it’s not at all about that.” Truer words have never been spo­ken. Here’s a band that mixes its musi­cal progress with play­ful­ness, joy, inten­sity, humor, and a rest­less hunger for new com­bi­na­tions. Sure, if you go see Nor­mal Love you’re going to see a bunch of guys hunched over prac­ti­cally pitch-black sheet music. But you’ll also see them do it pas­sion­ately with smiles on their faces and witty crowd ban­ter. Plus, you’ll be sur­rounded by a bunch of drunk hip­sters in someone’s liv­ing room. Carnegie Hall this ain’t.

B-side “Ndugo” (whose title I hope, but haven’t con­firmed, is a ref­er­ence to Jack Nicholson’s African pen-pal in “About Schmidt”) really under­scores Nor­mal Love’s play­ful side. The onslaught of muted plucks in the begin­ning verges on silly with­out los­ing its access to the realm of the awe­some. Throw in an unex­pected dynamic explo­sion, a Varèse-like siren glis­sando on the vio­lin and skit­ter­ing snare rims, and we’re get­ting into some truly bizarre shit.

Believe me, lib­er­at­ing “dif­fi­cult” music from the con­fines of the acad­eme is no small feat. There are prob­a­bly plenty of over-educated detrac­tors out there who would object to Nor­mal Love’s light­hearted approach to the avant-garde, just as there are prob­a­bly plenty of Zs fans (or for­mer mem­bers, rumor has it) who can’t believe that such seri­ous music should be shar­ing bills with a bunch of Nuggets-worshipping art-school dropouts with asym­met­ri­cal hair­cuts. The dif­fer­ence, of course, is that Zs is deadly seri­ous, whereas Nor­mal Love brings some­thing else to the head table. It’s called heart.

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — Severe Confection Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Ndugo Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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