Link to this article<\/a><\/p>\nUnholy genre splicers Normal Love and Satanized tamper in God’s domain.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n