Fresh Hells

Unholy genre splicers Normal Love and Satanized tamper in God's domain.

by Shaun Brady

KICK OUT THE JAMS: Normal Love (above) and Satanized share members and peanut butter. It can get a little messy. : Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The major difference between Normal Love and Satanized, both local groups that deftly combine modern classical, heavy metal and audacious experimental techniques, is evident simply in the way Evan Lipson and Alex Nagle, bassist and guitarist for both groups, talk about the music.

Seated on a long couch on the third floor of Jack Wright's Spring Garden musicians' house, Lipson continually has to correct himself (prompted by glares from Nagle) when he refers to Satanized songs as "pieces" rather than "jams," the preferred connotation.

There's no such terminology problem with Normal Love. The quintet, rounded out by guitarist Amnon Friedlin, violinist Carlos Santiago and drummer Eli Litwin, isn't shy about its head-scratching complexity. NL, which recently released its debut self-titled CD on High Two, makes brutally intricate music, aggressive and perfectionist. If the Warriors had scratched past the Orphans and the Baseball Furies only to chance upon a shiv-wielding chamber ensemble, Normal Love would be perfectly cast.

The band formed in the fall of 2005, coming together organically as a group of musicians sharing a similar desire to explore compositional ideas. Lipson and Santiago had met in high school in Philly; the former later hooking up with Friedlin and Nagle through other musicians or music gigs. Litwin's involvement came via a search, Nagle says, for "somebody who could play competent blast beats quickly with power, but could also read really well and would also be down to tackle some of these difficult rhythms."

Lipson says that over time, the members' varied interests have influenced each other. "We all had our own processes and goals of what we actually wanted to achieve with this general core idea, and that was manifested in the initial pieces. Now there's more of a concrete aesthetic, but hopefully it's still evolving prismatically."

Satanized, on the other hand, doesn't go in for any of those namby-pamby pretensions. The quartet, with drummer Pete Angevine and singer/turntablist Andrew Gaspar, is aggressively aggressive, slamming into listeners with a wall of noise, then backing up and rolling over them again.

Normal Love

Normal Love

(High Two)

 

Satanized

Sickness & Hellth: The Secular Chansons of Satanized

(Badmaster)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Normal Love's live shows is the way that, despite the ridiculous complexity of their music, their performances are never staid — concentrated as they are on the dots on paper in front of them, the band maintains a personality. Their self-titled CD, while maintaining the raw edge of their shows, brings the actual compositions to the forefront. Each member of the band (except, as yet, for Santiago) has penned compositions for the ensemble, as has Bowerbird/Relache director Dustin Hurt. All are vastly different, united by a common visceral impact and incisive sense of humor arising from the members rather than inherent in the material — proof again that it's the conglomeration of personalities, rather than technical ability, that makes this such an impressive and distinct unit.

Satanized's Secular Chansons, on the other hand, maintains the band's power-uber-alles game plan. Wearing the heritage of the quartet's no-wave forefathers proudly, the CD presents their "jams" with etched-in-steel sharpness. The tunes fuse Nagle's piercing, high-tension guitar with Angevine's thundering drums and Lipson's bludgeoning bass, Gaspar's barking and turntable scratches filling the middle ground with a manic tension.

—Shaun Brady

"In Normal Love," Nagle says, "I want to keep the rock influence in my music to a minimum. Basically, just instrumentation and volume — but [with] ... blast beats, because that's something very near and dear to me."

With Satanized, which Nagle founded in 2004 with a different lineup, there was no such aversion to rock. Their sound was influenced by the blend of music on the landmark 1978 no wave compilation No New York, which Nagle explains, "had all these bands playing noise with rock instruments and then you have James Chance stuff, which is funky and tight, and we wanted to have both at the same time."

Nagle, who cites his earliest musical influence as Morbid Angel and his favorite composer as Milton Babbitt, attempts to navigate between those two poles, using Satanized as a way to work out basic compositional ideas, some of which may go on to be further developed in Normal Love. He cites "Satanized Jam No. 1" as being influenced by compositional devices of Varese and Feldman as well as Bach, but ultimately, he says, "On the surface I wanted to make something that sounded like Teenage Jesus & the Jerks meet Watchtower."

Surface versus content is intrinsic to the Satanized sound, the element that attracted Lipson to come aboard shortly after the pair had joined with Normal Love. "Musically it was attractive to me for various reasons," Lipson says, "Just the concept attracted me, disguising musical complexity within an overall primitive aesthetic. Where dissonance is traditionally utilized to create musical tension towards a consonant resolution, Satanized brings dissonance to the fore, revealing a sometimes primitive and sometimes complex, but always harsh sonic texture that is most likely perceived as being somewhat more akin to noise. To put it another way, it's all tension without the resolution."

Listen to Satanized's "Satanized Jam No. 3":

That outwardly primitive feel is enhanced by Gaspar's blunt bellows and Angevine's knack for providing accentuation that manages to provide a steady, headbangable rhythm while punctuating the swarming nuances of the guitar/bass interaction. It also provides uniformity to a batch of music that otherwise lacks it. "What's nice about Satanized is that because it has this omnipresent treble going on, it's pretty easy to take music that's not really all that similar and make it work within this certain aesthetic context," says Nagle. "When I write for Satanized I try to keep my musical materials as limited as possible and develop them to what I think would be appropriate for a rock-song-length piece of music."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Normal Love plays Wed., Oct. 17, 9 p.m., $10, with WZT Hearts, Made in Mexico and Ruins, the Vacuum, 1729 Tilghman St. Satanized plays Sun., Oct. 28, 9 p.m., $8, with Drums Like Machine Guns, Aids Wolf and Old Time Relijun, Copy Gallery, 319 N. 11th St., third floor, www.badmasterrecords.com, www.myspace.com/normallove, www.myspace.com/thetruesatanized.