Naked by Talking to Walls

Teamed with Matt Krupa (cousin of the late Gene Krupa, the pioneering drummer for Benny Goodman in the ’30s) on drums, and Peter Shindler (of the Berkeley School of Music) on bass, their focused, tight and driving pop-music attack is a take-no-prisoners approach to dynamic and emotional performances.

With influences such as the Cure, Soul Asylum, REM, U2, Green Day, Talking Heads, and a touch of ’80s hair bands, they make artistic integrity fun. Talking to Walls weighs in with the nostalgia factor, not only in writing style, but also in choosing unusual, popular cover songs that are mixed into the live sets. However serious the band takes their music, they take themselves less so. How often does one hear Tiffany, Cher, or Fine Young Cannibals songs being teased during a set list? The band gets the crowd to laugh while hearing songs they forgot about and secretly love. The gambling certainly pays off—when they ended up on a hardcore metal bill, they played "Puff the Magic Dragon" and got lots of respect.

But it is the songwriting and passion that consistently gets the band its recognition. Engineered by Ron Spataro at Roncon Studios (a bunch of R&B bands you never heard of), and mastered by Matthew Azevedo at M Works (David Bowie, Nirvana), “Naked” boasts of seven radio-ready songs, poised to overtake the airplay their last single, “Sleeping with the Enemy” (from 2003’s “Two Weeks in November”) received from stations all over the Northeast. The opening track and lead single, “Cut Out.” starts with the sparse, simple confessions of reality in an almost solo performance, before dropping into a heavy club beat that careens into controlled chaos by song’s end. “Song Without a Chorus” follows, with Kelly lambasting himself over a former lover in a punk-rock dirge, before rejecting another’s advances in “Fade,” a bass-heavy U2/dub-inspired track. The rest of the album scrawls on, in postcard notes, until its rejoicing conclusion in “Come Home With Me.”

With a schedule planned to keep them busy playing and promoting along the East Coast and beyond, Talking to Walls will be committed to the vows of poverty and chastity that go along with being an unknown touring band from Connecticut...

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