PLUG THE WORDS “talk normal” into YouTube and you’ll retrieve a clip from Laurie Anderson’s 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. Live, her “Talk Normal” was a phantasmagoria of musical performance art excess: there’s a floating head, a surfeit of neon spandex, trippy oversized instruments and general, near-riotous, isn’t- Laurie-Anderson-kooky confusion.
Sonically, the eardrum-busting Brooklyn two-piece Talk Normal has little in common with Anderson, and aesthetically, it’s about as non-glam as bands seem to come these days. But the propulsive no-wave group has embraced Anderson’s ecstatically unhinged creative ethic, and its songs are noisy, carefully sculpted musical and lyrical freak-outs that often push the five-minute mark. “Whatever the word is for deeply experiencing music, we want to convey that to other people” says Sara Register, the band’s guitar and bass player, citing Anderson and, unexpectedly enough, Beyoncé as just two examples of musicians who have done that for her in the past.
If Talk Normal maintains an Andersonmeets-Beyoncé ethos, its sound is somewhere between the groove-laden experimentalism of Battles and the deconstructed punk of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and other early no wave. It’s loud, sometimes punishing stuff, but the virtuosity isn’t lost in the racket: Register’s guitar becomes more saturated in dread with every repeated riff, while the classically trained Andrya Ambro’s drumming maintains a rhythmic complexity that brings Juju and other percussion-heavy West African genres to mind. And a typical Talk Normal song is a complex give-and-take between the two musicians’ pulsating rhythmic lines; between droning guitar and infectious, clattering backbeats.
Register and Ambro met in the early aughts, during their undergraduate days at the Music Technology department at NYU, where Register studied and Ambro worked. Later they became band mates and formed Talk Normal in 2007 after their previous four-piece “fizzled out.” When that happened, Ambro says that they decided not to fall victim to the city’s top band-killers: inertia and burnout. “We just made it happen,” Ambro says of achieving what pretty much amounts to a New York DIY-trifecta: a band signed to Rare Book Room, releasing its debut fulllength Sugarland this week and opening for Sonic Youth at the Music Hall of Williamsburg Nov. 24. “We were just like, ‘We’re gonna make this,’” Ambro says. “What’s the next step?” And if that hadn’t been the case, we might never have found out what happens when a music technologist and a classically trained percussionist go noise rock (even though Ambro bristles at the “noise” label: “We’re not noise,” she says, “we’re noisy.”).
No argument on that—the opening guitar blast on “Stranger” sounds like an air raid siren, or possibly a washing machine at full whirl. And while the almost-serene bird calls that bracket “Lemonade” aren’t that fucked-up on their own, they’re a jarringly out-of-context frame for five minutes of pile-driving guitar riffs. Contrary to its musical-technological backgrounds, the group’s sound is produced on nothing more than a meticulously untuned guitar and a couple looping pedals. “We were into early blues artists who had done the most with the least” Ambro says. “We both like raw things.”
That rawness is crucial to the Talk Normal experience. “I make a sound on the guitar that entertains me,” Register says. “Then we can figure out how to put it into a pattern that entertains both of us. It’s no more complicated than that.” And in a way, it isn’t.The band’s grab-bag of influences notwithstanding: while a lot of nowave-nostalgia freaks overburden their sound with faux philosophical weight (I’m looking at you,Wolf Eyes),Talk Normal never has deliberate audience discomfort in mind—dare I say, the music can even be danceable.
Register insists that her band’s sound is meant to be joyful and fun, even if it’s joyfulness of a distorted sort.That tension should serve Talk Normal well for the Sonic Youth gig, which the group is interrupting a West Coast touring swing to play. “Our energy’s gonna be awesome” Ambro says, before suggesting she might go Girl Talk and get to know the audience up close. “Kids,” Ambro says, perhaps already envisioning the stage-rush she hopes her music is capable of causing. “Come on up!”
> Talk Normal
Oct. 27, Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St. (betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.), 212-253-0036; 8, $8
