• Links: Website, Bandcamp

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.

• Links: Record Label

Jesse Rifkin has spiritual concerns. As if you couldn't tell from the name (The Wailing Wall, also known as the Western Wall, is the holy remnant of an ancient temple in Israel, long a place of pilgrimage and prayer for Jews and, according to some, the site of the gates of heaven), the music of The Wailing Wall trades in love and death, faith and its absence, transcendence and exile. Rifkin takes a position in a long line of smart, thoughtful troubadors with acoustic guitars and a penchant for sonic exploration and biblical references (Leonard Cohen, Bill Callahan, Jeff Mangum). Like those songwriters he manages to turn pop songcraft into something with gravity and holiness, low art into high.

There is something ancient about Rifkin's music that belies his young age (23, if you're counting). Even if I'd never met him I could have instantly told you upon hearing his music that he's the kind of person my mother refers to as an old soul. Listening to Hospital Blossoms (his first full length, absolutely tingly and beautiful and available for free [what a deal!] at jdubrecords.org/wailingwall) one hears the eternity in his songs, which are not sad but sorrowful, not happy but joyful. They are like prayers, instantly memorable and built on melodies that sound as if they were not written but summoned whole from some other world, the way they did it back in the age of the muses, when the artist was merely a vessel for divine truth. This feeling of age grounds the music so much that the melodies can be stretched and dragged, just like old folk songs, without ever losing their strength. Often you'll hear male and female voices snaking around the same melody, never quite singing it outright, never quite in rhythmic unison. It is powerful because true beauty lives in the fleeting and half-hidden, in the peripheral glimpse, something so few young musicians understand.

And the lyrics! Oh, the lyrics. Full of resonant images like the “eager, eager earth” awaiting bodies to fill it, Hospital Blossoms is an album of loss and struggle and drama. It seems to revolve around the illness and death of the narrator's mother, but it tends to swirl mothers, sisters and lovers together in a Mangum-esque way, resulting in one surreal, perfect, mythic feminine form, who is also of course hopelessly lost, though there are hints of possible redemption throughout. On "Floral Park", Rifkin sings “when I see my darling cry I ask the good lord why she has to suffer,” which makes for a cruel juxtaposition with the recurring lyric, addressed to the sick lover, “don't you know that God above looks out for you?” Because of the way we listen to lyrics, catching a bit at a time over the course of many listens, the latter sounds at first listen like a declaration of faith in a troubled time, yet on repeated listens you begin to catch the whole shape of the song, and there is a moment at which the line transforms in your mind from calm serenity to bitter irony, that moment being just devastating.

Beyond all the quantifiably lovely things about Hospital Blossoms though, there is something else. It's in the moment in Dear Mother when Rifkin's vocals step forward into clarity after the scratchy, hiss-ridden quality of the first verse. It's all over "Hospital Blossom" the song, especially in the move from the propulsive clicking 3/4 of the verses into the swaying 6/8 of the choruses, with their honey sweet harmonies and deeply sorrowful lyrics about longing for death in order to reunite with a lost love in heaven. It is almost by definition impossible to put into words but it's important, so I'm going to try. As someone who deeply loves music (and plays it), I hear an unbelievable number of songs, many of them featuring the same five chords, the same strumming pattern on the same acoustic guitar, the same diatonic melodies. Yet in some of these songs there is some kind of magic that lifts them above all other songs. It feels like pins and needles and it quickens my heart. I've heard it in everything from Henry Threadgill ("Silver and Gold, Baby, Silver and Gold") to CCR ("Lodi") to Al Green ("I'm a Ram") to The Walkmen ("The New Year"), and I hear it in The Wailing Wall.

David Foster Wallace once spoke of an epiphanic “click” he heard while reading the very best fiction (he took the word from a Yeats poem which features a line about “the click of a well-made box”), something instinctually felt but impossible to explain, and something that is curiously absent from some of the most outwardly skillful writing (Updike, in his example). To steal another phrase from Wallace, The Wailing Wall “clicks like a fucking geiger counter.” They always make those tired old chords sound like something you've never heard before.

The band's Ampeater single is no exception to this rule, featuring a bouncy and wonderfully catchy non-album tune entitled "The Words We Choose" and an alternate version of the lovely and dark "Hospital Blossom". "The Words We Choose" is the danciest thing I've ever heard come out of The Wailing Wall, but it works far better than what you are probably imagining in your head right now after all that talk about death and spirituality. The casio and handclap percussion and accordion drones that kick off the song immediately call to mind Paul Simon's "Graceland" and the way the vocals are buried neck-deep in the huge swells of accordion chords would make me want to say something like acoustic shoegaze if that weren't kind of thing that makes me want to slap music writers, so never mind. Anyway, try not to bob your head up and down. Also try not to walk around for the rest of the day singing “Where has my heart gone? Whoa-oh-oh.” It's impossible. The moment (1:28) when the banjo and glockenspiel and harmonica enter and the tambourine starts playing full-time instead of doubling the backbeat sounds to me like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. In other words, it clicks.

The much sparser demo version of "Hospital Blossom" drops the percussion and brings the vocals to the fore, swathed in ghostly singing saw. The lyrics about highways running down wrists seem to nod to Leonard Cohen's "Dress Rehearsal Rag", and the stark arrangement illustrates just how well the song stands up even without the dramatic arrangement that fills out the album version. The melody fits so naturally over the simple fingerpicking (the exact pattern that Cohen uses on every single waltz) and the almost classical sounding rhyme of the lyrics is well-served by the exposure. “I know there's no light found in songs that I sing,” he sings, and I only hope he knows how untrue that is.

• Location: San Diego, CA
• Links: Bandcamp
• Personnel: Matt Binder (guitar/vox), Erik Visnyak (guitar/bass), Brian Reilly (guitar), Brian Leader (drums)

If Gang of Four had met and reproduced with My Bloody Valentine, and if their super fucked-up kids had been raised on The Beatles and Guided By Voices and had managed to live long enough without killing themselves to make a record, the result might sound a lot like Hotel St. George. Their music is heavily guitar-based with nouveau punk vocals, slick instrumental production that pays homage to the 70s DIY sound without quite emulating it, and enough harmonic complexity to set up and execute some brilliant hooks. There’s really nothing to dislike here, and there’s a whole lot to merit repeat listens. But on first contact, Hotel St. George does little to grab and secure its listenership. I put it on, thought, "this is pretty good," and went back to listening to Queensryche. City Boy Lemon, their latest LP release, is a grower not a show-er, and I've come back to it again and again over the past couple weeks with an eager ear to the melodic contour of their songs and the pure joy of dancing around in my underwear while Matt Binder sings "I always dream of sex, I always dream of death, it's always on my mind, it's always on my mind." Cute stuff. In sum, I've decided that I really like this band, and I'd like to share them with you guys.

They came to be over Thanksgiving 2008, when bassist/guitarist Erik Visnyak sat down at singer/guitarist Matt Binder's borrowed Wurlitzer piano and immediately proceeded to spill a glass of red wine on the poor creature. At this point, there were really only two things they could have done: fight to the death, or form a band. They chose the latter, bringing Brian Leader in on drums and Brian Reilly on guitar. In a mere two months their first EP Yippee!!! came to be, and its modestly penned punk ditties earned the band two nominations at the San Diego Music Awards. Hotel St. George's second release, Hundreds & Thousands, primarily featured Binder's more subtle and complex songwriting, which subsequently isolated their original fanbase of punk fans while garnering a new listenership amongst the indie crowd. Their next record, City Boy Lemon, split the difference between the two previous albums and offers sophistication without sacrificing an overarching punk aesthetic. Their next album promises to be a keyboard-based endeavor, which is no doubt an attempt to resolve some deep and pervasive tension regarding the Wurlitzer incident. I suppose making an album is, in fact, marginally cheaper than extended group therapy.

The two songs offered up on the 7-inch turntable today are "Apples & Pears" and "Island Man," the first track hearkening back to the band's roots in 70s punk and the second hinting at 2010's pop keyboard epic Fun Shine Line. I love all my children equally, but if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to pick one song to use as the A-side on some imaginary "Best of Ampeater" 7-inch, "Apples & Pears" would immediately come to mind. It mellows out after the first 14 seconds or so, but those first 14 seconds, man, pure gold. Never underestimate the power of a repeated ascending guitar lick--this song doesn't so much start as it does launch. Actually, that's a great analogy for what the song actually does. Once the intro riff rockets cut out, the song settles in comfortable orbit around Matt Binder's delicious (though at times borderline crooning) punk vocals. Every time I wonder whether the tune's leveled out for good, that guitar riff comes back in and propels it to greater heights. Hotel St. George has mastered the manipulation of tension and delayed gratification that makes for a truly compelling song, and "Apples & Pears" is a perfect example.

If A-side "Apples & Pears" is a look back at the classic punk aesthetic that formed the basis of Hotel St. George's music up until City Boy Lemon, B-side "Island Man" has a forward-looking indie vibe that hints at even greater things to come. That said, while their punk stylings are rock solid and ingeniously crafted, their indie chops are less perfectly developed. After a short vocal intro, the song lopes along for a couple seconds until it slams us with a pop chorus of "bop bop ba da, ba ba bada da". This is a great maneuver, but the killer thing about "Island Man" is that it's preciously short, clocking in at 2:30, and the "bops" only show up twice in the whole song. The solution? Loop that shit. You know that little repeat(1) button on your iPod? I use that a lot with this guy--usually 3 or 4 times does me good. "Island Man" gives us a peculiar marriage in a punk-length tune with pop features, and I feel like some of the melodic ideas could use a little bit more room to breathe and expand, or hell, just repeat a couple times. That's not to say that the pop features are themselves lacking in some way (in fact that's not at all the case, they're brilliant), but I nevertheless can't wait to hear how this sound evolves and matures on Fun Shine Line. Matt Binder's voice does something unique on these tunes--while his punk-oriented vocals are a nod to his predecessors, he shows some individual character in the pop tunes that's apart from any immediate influence. This is where Binder as Binder shines through, and it's a good indication of Hotel St. George's potential for growth as we race towards 2010 and the "new" Hotel St. George. Godspeed boys.

 

• Location: New York, NY

Ashraya Gupta is a voice out of another era - though exactly what era is up for debate. She most immediately recalls the sweet, delicate voices of 60s and 70s folk singers like Vashti Bunyan, but she sings with the wispiness and tight vibrato of Billie Holiday. At certain points she even sounds even older – in her precise intonation, she sounds something like an imagined popular singer from the 19^th century.  All of which is to say that Gutpa has an incredible voice that is immediately loved by most everyone who hears it; describing it is almost a waste of time. But, since one paragraph doesn't really do her justice, let's indulge a bit.

Gupta was born in India, raised in England and Cincinnati, and at last settled down in the most un-cosmopolitan of places (Long Island). She's been playing for years in another band--the Kitchen Cabinet. That band, upbeat and carefree almost to a fault, provided a nice breezy compliment to Gupta’s light alto. But here we get a real treat: Gupta on her own, exploring original ideas with just a keyboard to boot. Though this barebones set-up could prove monotonous or boring in another’s hands, Gupta carries these two songs with her voice alone.

A-Side “Dogwood”, built around a simple and haunting melody, finds Gupta in a near-whisper at points. The deep calm that she conveys here perfectly evokes a mood that is at once lonely and hopeful: “Damp and dim on an empty street/morning light never looked so bleak…but on a clear day from my window/I see the palisades so green like the summer/ on a clear day from my window/I see the days when first you looked at me.” It’s not hard to imagine her writing this song at her window as a kind of self-medication for those lonely cold seasons, and with her warm tone and ethereal arrangements, she welcomes you in. You’re almost right there with her, looking out. I first heard these songs while walking one weekend in the dim, airless hallways of a local housing project. Gupta’s quiet but powerful music was the perfect anecdote to that downtrodden environment.

“Great Expectations” expands Gupta’s soundscape with a minimal drum track. She sounds a bit wounded here, drowned out by the keyboards and percussion around her (if I do have one complaint, it’s that I want to hear vocals, though I suspect this is more an issue of levels than arrangement). When her singing at last rises above the accompaniment at song’s end, it’s to deliver a real kicker: “The echo chambers of this heart/ four empty rooms to tear apart.”

Both songs on this 7-inch are modest efforts that hint at something even greater for Gupta. They're little songs that pack a tight, quiet punch. Gupta's modesty – in setup, in delivery, in scope – suits her minimalist aesthetic, and puts the focus of her music where it belongs: on her voice. Where many solo records disappoint, becoming mere shadows of the bands that the artist usually inhabits, these two songs are gems in their own right.