Chuck Schuldiner Project

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Normul

Normul is pretty awesome. The music has a very experimental, progressive, deep, outlandish, generally awesome sound to it. In a lot of ways, Normul reminds me of spoon just completely throw away everything about spoon other than the musical ability. "Pale Surrender" kicks things off really well, with an amazing dreamy quality to it, intense groove, and just stellar vocals, with plenty of great guitar hooks. "Where you turn" is a bit of a let down, sounding like run of the mill, bland christian rock (based on what I could discern in the vocals), with similar vocals and songwriting style to just about everything my one friend shows me from his ipod. "An Idiot's Dream" isn't *much* better, for the most part removing the annoying guitar aspects of the previous song, and improving with some decent guitar riffs; but going to a similarly bland drum beat, but improving greatly on the synths. "Wake" has a very dark sound to it, its actually a touch melodramatic, heavily focusing on bass and drums. While "Wake" follows a predictable path, its really a very well executed melodramatic song, (granted the vocals can get better). The guitar seems to be absent on "Wake" until kind of late in which disappointed me after "Pale Surrender". "Coda Sky" has nice work on the piano, pulling off the melodramatic sound with success, and marking the second of five songs that I really liked the vocals on. Coda Sky actually reminded me of one of my other favorite alt rock bands, arcade fire, with similar vocal effects and tone--cheery, but dark.

Normul has demonstrated excellent songwriting and control over the instruments he uses, save for the vocals, which, after great success with the deeper, more emotional vocals on "Pale Surrender" and "Coda Sky" and even "Wake" degrade to the somewhat unfeeling, somewhat inaccurate, sounding vocals on "And Idiot's Dream" and "Where You Turn". Regardless, all four songs save for "Where You Turn" turned out great, and this EP/CD/whatever its called when its on myspace can hold its own against the bigger names in Alt Rock.

8.5/10
http://artists.ultimate-guitar.com/normul/


1 comment:

  1. Great review. Digging this band's sound.

    ReplyDelete