I’ll admit I was sceptical when I first heard of this. Yet another side project, with members of a band I love working with the musical brain behind another band that I used to be rather fond of.
The results, as it turns out, are really rather surprising. The clear mastermind behind the project is Dean Garcia, as the entire album sounds…much like Curve did in their later life. So that means rumbling bass, squalling, treated guitars and incredibly dense and claustrophobic production.
The origins of the album are given away in the opening seconds, with a sweep of synths and a breathy vocal that immediately brings to mind Toni Halliday. And that’s just for starters. KMFDM vocalist Lucia Cifarelli does the vocals here, and at points you really do have to doublecheck the credits.
Highlights? 6ft Below has been played by KMFDM themselves at recent gigs, and no wonder – it is the sound of KMFDM playing while racing through the sky. Katatonic goes the other way, and sounds like prime, mid-nineties Curve, with a great, multi-tracked vocal on the chorus. The seething Best of Everything is the pick of the album, mixing the best parts of both bands into a greater whole. Good Things works well, except for the slightly odd chorus (and has the best Toni impression here).
And perhaps that is the one issue with this album. Toni Halliday seems to loom over everything here, almost as if Lucia was used as a vocalist to effectively continue Curve under a different name. And this, added to the fact that although the album is undeniably great, no new ground is broken whatsoever – taking a long hard look at it, it is really just treading water. Both Curve and KMFDM advanced in leaps and bounds during their career – so why can’t this show any form of progression?
Or maybe I’m just looking at this too critically. At the end of the day, it is pretty clear who the target market is, and they are already lapping it up. So job done? As act one, yes. If there is another album, one step forward at least would be good.