Quartet's creative evolution mirrors immigrant experience

Lead singer Uliana Preotu and founder Leon Lyazidi (right) bring an international flair to New York City rock quartet MeTalkPretty.

Headlining a national concert tour for the first time would seem to be a stressful proposition, but the members of the New York City-based rock quartet MeTalkPretty seem relaxed on a recent day between shows in Houston and Dallas.

"We're having a blast. We have a day off, so we decided to drive down to Corpus Christi to take on a challenge from Hawthorne Heights in volleyball," says band guitarist and keyboardist Leon Lyazidi, referring to their newfound friends and tour mates in the Ohio pop-punk band. "We challenged them in (tour kickoff city) Daytona Beach to soccer, and we (beat them). Now they're trying to take advantage of our vertically challenged band in volleyball."

MeTalkPretty's athletic endurance will be further tested Sunday when the band brings its tour to Newby's, with opening acts Madina Lake and The Young Electric.

That MeTalkPretty should dominate on the soccer pitch should come as no surprise given the international roots of the band. Lyazidi is half-Moroccan and half-Spanish and lived all across Europe before coming to New York to study medicine. Soon, however, he set aside his studies to pursue his childhood passion, music.

Putting together the first lineup of what would become MeTalkPretty in 2006, Lyazidi began casting about for a strong singer to front the band and found another immigrant, Romania-born Uliana Preotu.

By her own admission, Preotu came from "nowhere" in the Eastern European nation, a former part of the Soviet bloc.

"I never thought that one day I would be on this level, singing on stage with the people I grew up idolizing," says Preotu, who moved here with her mother when she was a teenager. "You don't expect anything when you come from where I'm coming from. You don't dare to dream, to be quite honest. But I did."

(Preotu's mother, who had no health insurance, passed away three years ago. On this current tour, the band is picking one audience member to leave a handprint on their white grand piano. At the end of the tour, the piano will be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to various health care-related charities.)

Despite having sung in only one garage band back in Romania and having no real command of the English language (hence the band name, inspired by the essay collection by humorist David Sedaris), within a few years of arriving in New York, Preotu was looking for an opportunity to sing.

"I was putting ads out there looking for a band," Preotu says of meeting her future bandmate. "Most of the people I got in touch, they said, 'We do not want a female. We want a guy.' So I stopped signing the letters."

Preotu's frustrating search ended when she stepped into Lyazidi's rehearsal room.

"Leon didn't care about anything," the singer says. "He didn't care about my English. He didn't care about my terrible look that I had back then. The only thing he said was, 'You can definitely sing, and you need time to develop, and that's what we're going to do.'"

Working quickly, MeTalkPretty put out the first of a series of EPs that same year. By 2008, they had developed enough to earn a spot on the popular Vans Warped Tour. Last year, the band released its full-length debut, We Are Strangers, on the Universal Music imprint Eight O Five.

"It was an amazing feeling to finally put together a longer piece of music," Lyazidi says. "Putting out that first record was like the beginning of the band in our eyes."

With lots of big guitars and clear, soaring melodies carried by Preotu's strong, unadorned voice, We Are Strangers has a dark, dramatic, almost gothic feel that will remind many of Little Rock's Evanescence. The sound can be seen as an extension of their European roots, but Preotu says that as the band's progresses -- it is already debuting new songs in its live sets -- its artistic journey more closely resembles that of the immigrants.

"In the beginning, we brought our influences, and we pushed them a little much," she says about a process that sounds a lot like immigrants' integration into this country. "But like any band, it takes you a little while to polish your sound. We found our place to fit. We found what people like and what we like. And we try to find things to put in to make the music different but not too different."

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MeTalkPretty with Hawthorne Heights, Madina Lake, and The Young Electric

6 p.m. Sunday at Newby's, 539 S. Highland. Tickets: $10 in advance, $13 day of show. Advance tickets available at Newby's and online at stubwire.com. For more information, call (901) 452-8408, or visit newbysmemphis.com.

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