Video: Talk Normal, “In a Strangeland”
- story Matthew Schnipper
We were excited, but not surprised, to learn that Talk Normal is soon to open for Sonic Youth. Beyond the latter’s interest in fostering the underground they helped build, it’s a perfect pair. Talk Normal, whose debut Sugarland was released yesterday, have early Sonic Youth DNA (and DNA DNA—as we noted when we posted the MP3 of this song), with their bulbous repetition and No Wave fear mongering. Help me, I’m a stranger in a strangeland/ Don’t push me away. But they’re not sung, or really spoken. More orated, fear of xenophobia manifesting itself in sterile guitar chugs and taut drum beatings. The video for the song, super clean performance of the band playing in a well lit black room could just as easily be slick MTV clip as bizarre installation. Which is what happened to Sonic Youth for a little while, too. Now Talk Normal just needs to befriend Macaulay Culkin and the cycle will be complete.
Talk Normal, “In a Strangeland” MP3
- story Matthew Schnipper
In the sort of documentary, sort of drama, Downtown 81, about New York’s art and music scene in the early ’80s, the band DNA performs in a studio and it’s super awkward and arty, manufactured aggression, like a weird art provocation more than a band. Just a year or two after that, Sonic Youth wrote the song “Burning Spear,” titled in tribute to the heaviness of the dub legend interpreted through a bunch of guitar racket. Soon after that, Swans not only recorded a black hole of violent gurgle, but they called it “Raping a Slave.” There is an evolving history of bizarreness translated into brutal, arty music and New York duo Talk Normal has kept an ear on this brand of sludgy dirge. “In a Strangeland” from their upcoming album on Rare Book Room, Sugarland, is heavy and loud. It’s completely punishing in the simplest way, like they mic’d each other in a fight with baseball bats where their bones never break so they just keep swinging.
Download: Talk Normal, “In a Strange Land”
