Press Quotes

Press for Normal Love’s  self-titled CD from 2007.

“Music that succeeds at being alternately brutal and beautiful, sometimes both at the same time. ” – Stephen Potter (billboard.com)

“Normal Love constructs its own path alone. Despite the risks involved, this approach remains infinitely honorable. Like an intrepid racing car driver who, by speeding too fast along the track risks losing a wheel and therefore destroying the car, the Philadelphia band ignores the forces of order and trusts only its instinct.”

-Mathieu Carr (translated from http://www.progressia.net/index.php4?rub=chroniques&idchronik=1501)

“For all their precision, and holy hell, the aural somersaults and tightrope-walks they pull off make Cirque du Soleil look like a flea circus, NORMAL LOVE is messy. Rock ‘n’ roll messy. Spontaneous-combustion messy… 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.”
-Philadelphia City Paper {Shaun Brady}

” Two guitars, bass, drums, violin, all herky-jerky in a very precise and through-composed way. There’s no soloing to speak of, but there are plenty of jagged edges to catch your ear on. “Severe Confection” opens their debut CD, which makes its fanfare-like qualities a plus, and also makes the simultaneous-but-not-together aspects of the first two minutes or so all the more powerful, once they congeal into unison riffing that recalls vintage no wave and contemporary post-punk, but without the fashionable clothes. – Phil Freeman (Paperthinwalls.com)

” Sure, they’re “loud and brutal,” ultradissonant, but darned if they aren’t poised and polished.”
-Philly Weekly {David R. Adler}

Electric guitars aren’t just for power chords anymore. Normal Love, aquintet drawn from the Philly experimental music community, may look like a rock band, but what comes out of them is much more unusual. The group is committed to playing new works by its members and other composers working in a way that combines genres, what composer/concert organizer Dustin Hurt refers to as “new rock complexity.”
(Philadelphia Metro)

“Off the Hook!…Normal Love’s music is the kind that’s just so perfectly discordant, so assaulting and soothing at the same time. And the thing that amazes me about these guys is the fact that they plat with this totally controlled abandon, as if the perverse manipulation of their instruments is the most natural thing in the world.”
Phawker. Com

“ Segments of acidic beauty and transcendent force”
Signal to Noise

“…it’s an extension of the old punk ethos, which shunned any kind of improvisation and placed a premium on loud, edgy sound. It’s the sort of thing the Minutemen might have done if they’d been listening to classical music rather than punk rock.”
“Your future favorite bands will be almost certainly be influenced by the almost endless aspects of Nornal Love’s debut album never heard or attempted before.”