Reviews – MAR
Author: Jim Allem
Source: Prefix Apr 24, 2008
8.5 out of 10
“Make a Rising makes challenging music, but the ample rewards easily outway any demands.”
Reivews – Normal Love
Author: George Parsons
Source: Dream Magazine, Nov. 2007
“Chunky blocks of Trout Mask-like cul de sacs and puzzles blatted out instrumentally by this Philadelphia quintet. Tightly constructed and walking sideways up the walls and across the ceiling with spidery glee. Though difficult this is also a lot of fun as it shifts between speedmetal, suspense soundtrack snippets, and stark steamroller antics. While tiny oysters saw chunks out of the scenery, and blind birds navigate complicated mazes.”
Reviews – Normal Love
Author: Phil Freeman
Source: PaperThinWalls, Jan 2008
“The jazz-grind tumble of Flying Luttenbachers, the short/sharp shocks of early Orthrelm, the poke-’n’-twist of DNA, the fiery electric work of avant-jazz violinist Mat Maneri—Philly-based instrumental quintet Normal Love appeals to all of these sensibilities with a unique approach to punk and jazz.”
Reviews – Normal Love
Author: Shaun Brady
Source: Philadelphia City Paper
Unholy genre splicers Normal Love and Satanized tamper in God’s domain.
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.
“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.”
Reviews – Normal Love
Author: Phil Plencner
Source: Music Meridian, Dec. 2007
“Along with Zs, this Philadelphia band is the future of music. Buckle up and get ready.”
Reviews – Normal Love
Author: George Parsons, Nov. 2007
Source: Dream Magazine
“Chunky blocks of Trout Mask-like cul de sacs and puzzles blatted out instrumentally by this Philadelphia quintet. Tightly constructed and walking sideways up the walls and across the ceiling with spidery glee. Though difficult this is also a lot of fun as it shifts between speedmetal, suspense soundtrack snippets, and stark steamroller antics. While tiny oysters saw chunks out of the scenery, and blind birds navigate complicated mazes.”
Reviews – Normal Love
Author: Adam Webb-Orenstein
Source: Prefix Mag, Jan. 2008
“Normal Love’s eponymous debut is a parade of frenzied dissonant passages abbreviated occasionally by briefly sustained blasts and a few passages of slower noodling. With this first offering, the band members demonstrate their prodigious virtuosity. They also give a glimpse of their unique and broad sonic palette. …what makes this debut laudable is its refusal to make that kind of concession to the listener. There are plenty of other musicians who want to give you bliss. For now, Normal Love would rather mess with your head.”
Reivews – HNA
Author:
Source: Wonkavision
Link to this article
His Name is Alive is unintentionally cryptic. Like how do you pronounce that album title? What are these locks of hair composed with sleeping gerbils (or are those little raccoons? I can’t tell) in the album art. What is this cartoonish bug-eyed monster on the back?
Lead instrumentalist War, or Warn Defever, clears up some of the mess with a nice explanation for each of the songs on the website. This features actually adds a lot to the album, and it’s something every band should do: explain what they mean. Coming out of Detroit, His Name is Alive has toured with Low and Arab Strap and create electronic folk pop with a dallop of 70s classic rock. Everything seems at the same level, though – so their quiet whispers in the orchestral “Youngblood” sound just as fierce as the pumping “Sangaree.” Or maybe vocalist Andrea Moriti just can’t be moved to excitement. David Bowie likes the band and compared Moriti to Karen Carpenter, which is as fair an assessment as anything else.
This really is as organic as electronic synths and organs can get. His Name is Alive has a hushed nature that is like a run-on sentence, but when they perk up, it rouses everyone to attention, such as with the closer, “Come To Me.” That’s one of the best funk beats to come out in awhile, but once again Moriti doesn’t quite do it justice, making it ripe for remix. “XMMER” is an album that demands a lot of time to explore and exploit to probe the full goodness that these depths have to offer. [By: Josh Spilker]
Rating: 3/5
Reviews -HNA
Author: Trevor Tremaine
Source: Glamor Profession
Link to this article
The occasional inspired detours aside, the venerable Detroit-area indie rock institution His Name is Alive are more commonly heralded for their playfully experimental, soulful dream pop. Taking heed, I presumed the “tribute” of the disc’s title to be of a more abstract nature, Marion Brown being the miraculous, under-sung free jazz saxophonist whose sides for ESP and Impulse! hold some of the most exploratory, expansive large ensemble improv since the most definitive dates of Ornette, Shepp, and Coltrane (whose Ascension features Brown’s visionary playing). Instead, to my profound perplexity and delight, this set could not be more reverent. HNIA chief Warn Defever rounded up members of Ann Arbor-based unit NOMO to tackle a number of Brown’s compositions (apparently with his blessing, judging from the sticker on the case: “It’s beautiful, thank you. You really understand me.”) in a joyous style that captures the spirit of late-60s free music without ever impinging on sentimentality, and the swirly, reverb-laden dueling Rhodes pianos and ecstatic lead electric betrays the namesake’s psychedelic roots. Every track is a killer, alternating between dense, moody soundscapes á la Alice Coltrane, and swinging, energetic grooves reminiscent of Joe McPhee’s Nation Time.
Reviews – HNA
Author:
Source: Audiversity
“Ornette Coleman is the same as Charlie Parker, but he did it a different, the opposite way. Charlie Parker did everything that he did based on knowing harmony and chords. Ornette Coleman did everything he did based on knowing how to reach inside of himself and create music intuitively.”
—Marion Brown, 2003 in an interview with Fred Jung on allaboutjazz.com
Though John Coltrane is the well-established hero in Brown’s descriptive pairing of the quintessential bop saxophonist and the original avant-garde innovator, Brown himself, along with other sax players like Archie Shepp or Dewey Redman, have also brought vital blends of chordal improvisation and borderless imagination to jazz. Almost unanimously described as over-looked or under-sung, Marion Brown was an inside member of the mid-60s NYC vanguard jazz movement recording alongside and inspiring/drawing inspiration from Coltrane, Coleman and Shepp. In fact, after relocating from Atlanta to New York in 1965, his very first recording session was for Coltrane’s now legendary Ascension, which is often pinpointed as the moment the celebrated saxophonist emerged as the avant-garde spiritual leader. The other two saxophonists Coltrane brought in to help inspire his own sound in new, fresh directions, Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, went on to well-revered careers, but Brown, though he recorded a number of respected albums over the last forty years (nonetheless for the likes of Impulse!, ESP, ECM, Fontana, Freedom and Black Lion), has remained thoroughly under the radar. Would I have ever imagined Warn Defever’s genre-defying indie-pop outfit His Name is Alive to be the group to pay proper respects to Brown? No, but Defever is an underappreciated musician and composer in his own right, so perhaps it is only proper.
For the last seventeen years, Defever has been experimenting with His Name is Alive’s dream-pop sound, from the found sound and tape loop obsessed 1990-debut Livonia to last September’s Xmmer, in which the band explores a myriad of styles from Afro-pop to folk that shimmer with pristine production. No matter his stylistic interest of the moment, Defever’s music in any of its concoctions is underpinned by the experimental and spiritual aesthetic established by Brown’s mid-60s jazz scene. Music should never be paint-by-numbers or intently confined to a specific genre’s framework to express an idea; it should be the artist’s expression of feeling regardless of predetermined principles, melodic, atonal or otherwise. Maybe Defever is inspired by Brown’s particular idiom in the same way Coltrane was back in ’65 and set out to use this vernacular to push his own musical expression in new directions. Or perhaps he is just a fan who wanted to bring attention to the overlooked saxophonist. Either way, Sweet Earth Flower is one of the most inspired and interesting albums I have heard all year.
Originally intended as a one-off concert at the University of Michigan Art Museum to pay tribute to Brown, the success of the evening sparked follow-up recording sessions from the talented ensemble. Including members of NOMO and Antibalas, this concoction of His Name is Alive pulls songs from both Brown’s initial mid-60s period including cuts from 1965’s Marion Brown Quartet on ESP and 1966’s Juba-Lee on Fontana along with his mid-70s reemergence on Impulse! after relocating to Europe, including ‘73’s Geechee Recollections, ‘74’s Sweet Earth Flying and ‘75’s Vista. Three of the eight tracks are from the original concert, while the other five tracks include two studio renditions of the live tracks and three other interpretations from the nine-piece band.
I would go into the particular approach for each song, but Thom Jurek’s review on the All Music Guide is more knowledgeable and on point than I would ever be able to do, so I respectfully nod in you in that direction. The music is that of delicately toned, almost ambient-leaning non-linear jazz. The players mesh seamlessly: Defever’s guitar work rarely takes spotlight (nor does any instrument really), restraining instead to a barrage of differently approached ostinatos or hypnotic chords; Defever, Elliot Bergman and Erik Hall’s electric and acoustic keys paint lush, detailed and poignant images with their sensual melodic improvisations; tenor saxophonist Bergman, trumpeter Justin Walter and alto saxophonist Michael Herbst accentuate and solo with subtlety, driving each track with modality akin to the more reflective and melodic momen