Talk Normal Interview

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Sleepy-headed Brooklyn duo chat nonsense about their alarming sound

Photography Mickey Gibbons

Trying to remember a dream after a night’s snooze is tough. Awake, you rub the sleep from your eyes, and the once-vivid images are erased from memory, or blurred into some lysergic, incomprehensible fantasy compared to what lays before you — reality.

Talk Normal’s guitarist Sarah Register is struggling to recount a dream she had a few years ago. Sat across the table, she balances her head on top of her hand, trying to stay awake. The Brooklyn duo have just arrived at London’s XOYO venue, following a four-hour journey stuck in traffic from Brighton, where they’ve been supporting Wire on their UK tour.

“Russia!” drummer Andrya Ambro interjects like an obtrusive alarm bell. “We were going to play a show and you couldn’t find your hat.”

“No,” Sarah wheezes out with a long yawn, “that’s not it. I’d lost a hat… Something about a glove… There was a hill… There was definitely some sort of struggle… The hat was very fuzzy and warm…”

The slumberous setting Sarah is labouring to recall became the title of the group’s acclaimed debut record, 2009’s Sugarland. “We wanted the record to represent some kind of fantasy land,” explains Andrya.

They are an unassuming pair. Both in their early thirties with teddy bear-brown hair and soft eyes, they appear more girls-next-door than girls-that-make-discordant-rock, as they do in Talk Normal. Along with 2008’s ‘Secret Cog EP’, their hypnotic dissonance has drawn comparisons with the likes of DNA, Sonic Youth and Laurie Anderson. But how would they describe it?

Andrya, tongue in cheek: “I’d say it’s like Bad Moon Rising meets Kanye West.” Whatever their nonsense patter and more ‘aggro’ elements of their music, Talk Normal’s output to date is surprisingly focused and free of extraneous detail, a fact the pair chalk up to the example set by their moniker: “It just reminds us to be more simple,” explains Andrya.

Like their music, Talk Normal’s conversational chemistry flows with sibling fluency. This is probably down to the close relationship they have held since meeting at NYU a decade ago on music-related courses. Both sound engineers by day, they are due to put the finishing touches to writing for their second record on returning to the States.

Is it hard knowing when to stop touching up your own work?

“Generally we agree whether or not the thing that we agree on yet,” explains Andrya, sort of. “Does that make sense?”

No. I thought you were supposed to talk simpler?

“In our minds [the record] is going to be the same thing,” she tries, again. “But whether or not what exists at the moment is that thing, we’re not sure yet.”

Outfit – Camden Barfly, London – Live review

Originally published: NME

It’s been almost a year to the day that Liverpool’s Outfit first formed. Cause to celebrate, you would think, but a show at Camden’s Barfly will soon quell any commemorative mood. A small crowd gathers front of stage, looking static, stern and determined to burst the birthday balloon of one of 2012’s hotly-tipped bands. Not that the five-piece should care, though. It’s been a year in which they lived in a Merseyside mansion for next to nothing, became darlings of the local scene and blogosphere with their synth-pop seductions, and moved to London to capitalise on their precocious talents. They’ve already had their cake and eaten it.

And tonight’s show warrants the hype they have received. Opener ‘Vehicles’ cruises with Hot Chip-like electronic flourishes, before flowering into the pop-curious ‘Every Night I Dress Up As You’. And while they may have deracinated themselves from their Mersey motherland, their musical roots still run deep: there is as much a Beatles-inspired boy band charm and confidence to their performance, as Teardrop Explodes brooding behind ‘Everything All The Time’. ‘Without Trace’ twists and turns like a more rhythmically challenging Late Of The Pier track. But it’s the subtle, pop-on-ice single ‘Two Islands’ that steals and settles the night, blooming with Wild Beasts-tinged beats and celestial guitar solos. One year on, Outfit are already into a self-assured stride.

The Dø – Hoxton Bar and Grill, London – Live review

Originally published: NME

The idea of a French/Finnish indie pop duo is enough to send a shudder down the spine of the average man. But as The Dø takes to the stage in front of throng of Euro-pop loving proponents, the only sensation that is felt is one of fondled balls in excitement and anticipation. Returning to the capital for the first time since the release of their second album ‘Both Ways Open Jaws’, the duo of Olivia Merilahti and Dan Levy are in sprightly form – and the crowd are more than happy to be showered in their saccharine, scattered pop.

Continuing on from their ambitious and fun-filled debut, 2008’s ‘A Mouthful’, the group persevere with their augmented pop in their new output. Opener ‘Gonna Be Sick!’ lopes to a loose reggae beat and, similarly, the M.I.A.-inspired ‘Slippery Slop’ continues to warm and unwind the audience with its Caribbean lilt. All good, you would think, but as the live five-piece get into their groove, there are moments when you feel like you’re watching the whitest band alive take on funk in all its gaudy derivatives. And Olivia (dressed in a pink tutu) and Dan (wearing a porkpie hat) do little to help the awkward imagine as they skank and bound across the stage.

In spite of this, their set is executed with precision and finesse. ‘Playground Hustle’, ‘On My Shoulders’ and ‘Aha’ are well-received, and hallmarks of their genre-spanning innovative pop. Just a pity they look like spanners doing so in the process.

Shabazz Palaces – Madam JoJo’s, London – Live review

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Photography: Matt Wash

Shabazz Palaces are packing heat. But few would have thought that their inaugural show in the UK would have sweat dripping from the ceiling a mere few songs into their set. The release of their debut album proper, 2011’s Black Up, was something of a loaded gun forced to hip hop’s temple. A rude awakening for a genre that has, in recent, sat back on its laurels and subscribed to a formulaic routine of chartable hits and resulting pop icons. The Seattle-based outfit held a mirror to its peers and questioned their integrity and myopia while offering something different in return – a visceral, listener-focus record that was as much informed by jazz’s freeform movement and expression as hip hop’s heaviness and flow.

And similarly to their record, their live show is focused, lean, muscular and progressive. From the opening snaps and loping beats of ‘An Echo From The Hosts That Profess Infinitum’, their slow and queasy analogue sound is equally as dark and dense as it is luminous and light. Palaceer Lazaro on the mic taunting the hip hop “Kings at leisure time”, “Who do you think you are?” repeatedly with his battle cry.

Better known as Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler of former Grammy-winning act Digable Planets, Palaceer has found a new path fronting Shabazz Palaces’ leftfield leanings. And with Tendai Maraire in cohort, their unity and sense of direction through a set of darting and disparate sounds is mesmerising. Little about their music will even cusp the mainstream sphere of listening (which is part of its overriding glory), and something Palaceer acutely points out amid the oscillating, low-end bass whomps of ‘Free Press and Curl’: It’s “Catchy yes, but trendy no.”

But in hop hop’s current sea of mediocrity, Shabazz Palaces are floating on a slipstream of artistic integrity. With psychedelic beats for paddles and chatting poetic breeze for flow, the audience struggle to bounce in time with their off-kilter nuances, but can’t help but nod in agreement with their crusading direction away from convention. Again, a consensus of arms going up with the outfit’s rhetoric during ‘Youlogy’: “Let me make a toast with champagne to all the years that thuggin’ went mainstream, where stars rise and fall like organised regimes.”

Shabazz Palaces are packing heat. But the only thing that they are unloading on are the doors to hip hop’s perception and pedestrianism in a very brilliant way.

Death Grips – Old Blue Last, London – Live review

Originally published: NME

Hip hop has always been about selling out. It’s part of the game. But 2011 has caught many of its big hitters with their pants down, fingers lifting from the till and filling their trunk with easy money and own self-worth. With Jay-Z and Kayne West’s ‘Watch The Throne’ flatlining, the record’s artillery became solely that of its alliance’s notoriety – two key players that have helped shift the hop to pop, commercialism and cash over credibility.

While these heads of state have taken their eye off the sovereignty, the genre has seen reluctant messiahs like Tyler, The Creator stepping forth to preach from the gutter and claim its crown. But California’s Death Grips spot frailties in all of those that have declared rank and royalty. They’re not here for the taking of authority and thrones – they are here to rob from the rich and sodomise their unholy remains.

Their street-like demeanour is not simply confined to that of the lyrical mania that lashes from MC Ride’s acerbic tongue – he is merely the one wielding the axe with which they sonically bludgeon. What drives his psychosis is the hybrid noise that Flatlander (production) and Hella’s Zach Hill (drums) infect with their musical malady: horrorcore, IDM, black metal, industrial, futurism, post-techno. As a unit they are muscular, compact, concise and cutthroat; a by-product of the streets of Sacramento from which they have survived, scraping at a loaded barrel of macabre influences and infirmary. Their debut mixtape entitled ‘Exmilitary’ (a free download) pulled an incendiary trigger on something new, fearless and soulless in the same vein as HEALTH, Salem and Odd Future.

Bare-chested with a penitentiary physique, the lawless MC Ride rips and curls over their bastardised sound with a masochistic and depressed minefield of lyrical shock therapy. From self-assessment in the Charles Mansun-inspired ‘Beware’ (“I am the beast I worship”), to the prison cell screams of ‘Klink’ and political corruption in the klaxon-driven ‘Thru The Walls’, Death Grips are as energised and awe-inspiring as the sub-atomic particle which they grasp and rasp at in ‘Takyon (Death Yon)’. Death Grips are fighting a war of attrition, and they are holding a shotgun in the face of all of those opposing.

Beirut – Brixton Academy, London – Live review

Originally published: The Stool Pigeon

Photography: Sebastien Dehesdin

It’s a wonder how Zach Condon’s Beirut has become so popular with the general public. With his music drenched in influences ranging from Mexican and Balkan folk to French chanson, it’s hardly the stuff that you’d think could strike a populist chord, let alone garner enough support to sell out Brixton Academy. But the band’s three-week tour of the UK — their first return to the isles since their biggest show supporting Arcade Fire during the summer — has seen Beirut’s esoteric sound greeted with open arms by those seduced by its strange tongues and alluring sentiment.

It’s precisely these qualities with which Condon embraces the audience right from the start, opening with ‘Scenic World’. “When I feel alive I try to imagine a careless life, a scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking,” he warbles, his vocal not so much sung into the mic as beyond it and onto some higher, idyllic plane illustrating a woozy nirvana. Buzzing like bees around a pint glass with excitement, the crowd offers a chorus of drunken grunts and groans as it sways in time.

Beirut’s third full-length album, The Rip Tide, has seen Condon return with a direct, more conclusive sound that still pulls at the thread of its quirky, brass-led predecessors. Its influences and outlines are more polished and absorbable, flirting with pop’s ease of attainability, yet maintaining all the nuances for which the band is famed. The likes of ‘Sante Fe’ and ‘East Harlem’ sit like snug compatriots alongside the far-flung references of ‘Postcards From Italy’, ‘Nantes’ and ‘My Night With The Prostitutes From Marseille’; Condon appearing more at ease on topics closer to home than the cryptic and perhaps fanciful world in which first crafted his career.

Although little is said between the songs, the music’s rhetoric is engaging enough in its own right. Not that Condon would have noted the whites of everyone’s wide eyes staring at him throughout: instead, he chooses to look down at his shoes, shoulders arched like a child being told that they’ve been misbehaving. Even so, the Santa Fe-born singer exerts a Pied Piper-like influence over band and audience alike, spearheading the clarion call of the brassier sections with his trumpet, and steering the vocal melodies and harmonies of the six-piece like a crooning David Byrne.

Touching renditions of ‘Goshen’ and ‘Carousels’ carry a raptured crowd into the encore. But as the band departs at the end of ‘The Gulag Orkestar’, and the lights go up, Zach remains with his ukulele in hand. His eyes coyly evaluate the room for a brief second before he clears his throat: “I’m not ready to leave you all just yet.” And with a soft thrum, ‘The Penalty’ begins, his vocal filling the auditorium and the glazed-eyes of all those in attendance.

Grimes – ‘Geidi Primes’ – Album review

Originally published: NME

Despite the esoteric veneer of this bedroom-born debut, Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) has packed ‘Geidi Primes’ with enough ideas to make for an instantly accessible and intimate listen. Blending genres like paints on a palette, the Montreal-based artist’s chameleonic approach sees her switch between oriental pop (‘Sardaukar Levenbrech’), chillwave (‘Zoal, Face Dancer’), and post-rock (‘Venus In Fleurs’) with attentive ease. But it’s tracks like ‘Feyd Rautha Dark Heart’ and ‘Avi’, where the 22-year-old cavorts in a similarly darker and beat-driven vein to Zola Jesus and Austra, that Grimes’ celestial vocal and her ear for a hook really draws you in.

Grimes – The Haunt, Brighton – Live review

Originally published: Clash magazine

Images: Stephen Fourie

When you buy fish and chips in Brighton, you are sent away with a warning: “The seagulls’ll have that, lad, if you’re not careful,” explains the assistant, who looks like he has used the chip fat to craft his sleek hairstyle. I’m but a third of the way through my delightfully battered lunch when I take to the pier, stepping onto its frangible structure and into what can only be described as a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’. Shrieks of “Mine! Mine! Mine!” descend from above, and in one fatal swoop and a flash of white and grey feathers, my food is being taken out to sea. The grimy, briny bastard.

Montreal-based Grimes, aka Claire Boucher, then, is something of an aural saviour to my ambrosial robbery. The 22-year-old’s 2010 debut album ‘Geidi Primes’ has been re-released via No Pain In Pop, and is packed with more ideas than a government-based think tank; the difference being that Boucher’s work – although appearing esoteric on the surface of its pop patina – is as instantly accessible as the likes of Nite Jewel and Destroyer with whom she cuts a similar cloth.

Stood in front of a desk that props up a variety of recording, looping and sound-manipulating devices, Boucher is academic and well-rehearsed in her delivery. Circling the mic in front of her mouth like an X-Factor contestant awkwardly biding their time, she reaches ethereal and angelic vocal highs amid the pre-recorded beats that she drops at the flick of a switch. With the likes of ‘Zoal, Face Dancer’, ‘Rosa’ and ‘Caladan’ being sonically stitched into one another tonight, Boucher’s efforts are as intoxicating as a lilting lullaby.

Azari & III – XOYO, London – Live review

Originally published: Clash Magazine

Images: Stephen Fourie

The last time Azari & III where in the capital they were supporting Friendly Fires’ pre-release show for their sophomore album ‘Pala’. Little attention was paid to the dance act on the night, performing early doors to a meagre crowd following the few pieces of web-based hyperbole at the time.

Returning with their eponymous debut album in the can, tonight’s performance by the Toronto-based quartet is met with baited breath by a burgeon crowd of hedonists bouncing off each other like bees in a coke can. The buzz is understandable – and palpable – as their take on tried and tested house music stands above the vacuous bleating that the genre has often produced as a whole since its heyday.

But it’s on a live-scale that Azari & III come into their own, as the production duo of Dinamo Azari and Alixander III reel the crowd in with ‘Manhooker’ and cut them loose with ‘Hungry For The Power’. The temperature and entertainment value of their set is turned up furthermore by the confident and outlandish stage theatrics of Fritz and Cedric, a vocal-pairing that demand more attention than two queens bickering over the last feather boa and stilettos in Soho.

Their nostalgic yet dynamic take on Nineties house is all consuming, and their comparisons to the likes of Hercules And Love Affair are well deserved. Bass-driven tracks like ‘Lost In Time’ and ‘Manic’ are intertwined with syncopated beats and swirls of synth to make for a hard and heavy flowing set. Stripping down to their trousers and torso, Cedric and Fritz grope and grind a throbbing atmosphere with set finisher ‘Into The Night’, putting the ‘amp’ into their unabashed camp performance.

The Horrors – York Hall, London – 17/6/2011

Originally published: Clash Magazine

Images: Natalie Seery

There is something quite apt about The Horrors’ choice of venue for tonight’s airing of their new album ‘Skying’. The world famous East End boxing hall that has stood since 1929 was threatened with closure in 2004, only to survive thanks to investment and a new direction. The Horrors, who were dropped by Loog Records after poor sales from their 2007 debut ‘Strange House’ (a chaotic and clumsy record that thumbed blindly at rock music’s sharper edges), would return with their second album ‘Primary Colours’ in 2009 to a critically acclaimed reception and a Mercury Music prize nomination for their efforts.

One theory is that they let out the seam of their jeans by an inch; another is to do with the album’s all-star production (Craig Silvey, Geoff Barrow) and creative team (Chris Cunningham); another is that they stopped doing photo shoots and went away and did their homework, instead of being branded a style of content act. Whatever they did, it worked, and The Horrors continue to flourish with their third album ‘Skying’.

And as the sky rings every last droplet out from the clouds above, The Horrors open with ‘Changing The Rain’ – the opening song of their new album. It’s a ruminating track with a steady Stone Roses swagger, cascading synths and a rousing key change that seeps seamlessly into ‘Scarlet Fields’. Any peace that it may have instilled into the audience is stolen, though, as the alarm bell ring of ‘Three Decades’ rushes into action at the snap of a snare drum and the sound of guitars being swung around like chainsaws.

Tracks from ‘Strange House’ are left firmly locked in the cupboard, as The Horrors continue to distance themselves from their style over content debut. Instead, their set is dedicated to the best of ‘Primary Colours’ and the auspicious future of their new material.

It may be a future that they look into with a sullen, forlorn expression, but their music continues to step forward with a maturing gate. ‘Endless Blue’ opens with a lysergic-glaze of soft percussion and simmering synths, only for a Stooges-esque riff to smash headlong into its stillness like a hammer on glass. Similarly, the juddering pace that electrifies ‘I Can See Through You’ takes on a vicious life of its own.

Until ‘Skying’ has time to seep into the public’ consciousness, it’s the likes of ‘Sea Within A Sea’ and ‘Mirror’s Image’ that continue to animate the crowd on the night. But with ‘Moving Further Away’ building and brooding for an exhilarating eight-minutes of experimental orchestration, The Horrors continue to prove they are on fighting form and unified over their musical identity.