Are You Normal?

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Are You Normal? is the second studio album by Ned's Atomic Dustbin, the five-piece band from Stourbridge in the West Midlands, released in November 1992 on Columbia Records and pro duced by Andy Wallace. It arrived in the charged gap between the end of the Madchester rave scene and the emergence of Britpop, at a moment when British alternative music was casting about for a new direction, and it reached number one on the UK Albums Chart. The album was recorded with all five members writing collaboratively in a room together — a process lead singer Jonn Penney later described as "fluid, easy songwriting" — and it showcases the band's defining sonic peculiarity: two bass players, Alex Griffin handling the high mid-range and Matt Cheslin anchoring the low end, an arrangement that originated by accident when a drunk Penney invited two bassists to audition simultaneously and decided to keep both. That dual-bass architecture, combined with Rat's guitar work and Dan Warton's machine-gun drumming, gave the band a dense, rhythmically complex wall of sound that the contemporary press variously labeled grebo, punk-funk, sub-hardcore, and pre-industrial.Across its 13 tracks, the album moves from the factory-machinery-opening "Suave and Suffocated" through the punishing lead single "Not Sleeping Around" — which PopMatters has described as a "nuclear Molotov cocktail" and a WWII fighter-plane strafing — to the more melodically expansive closer "Intact" and the tenderly observed "Spring," Penney's own favorite on the record. Lyrically, the songs are written predominantly in second person and operate on a principle Penney calls the "wit of the staircase" — the French concept of l'esprit de l'escalier, the brilliant riposte that only arrives after an argument has ended — giving them a sardonic, misanthropic edge that distinguishes them from the suppressed adolescent angst of their American grunge contemporaries. The album also generated minor college radio traction in the US with "Legoland." Penney has called it the band's "finest moment as an album," and it remains their most celebrated record, a kinetic and melodically sophisticated high-water mark from a band that always seemed perpetually on the cusp of wider recognition. Show more