The Curls – ‘Slice of Life’ Album Review.
The Curls – Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Album art and cover image by Dana T.
I don’t know whether to take The Curls seriously or not, because if you look at their bandcamp page their music has been tagged as ‘Fart Rock’ and they have a Flugelhorn player… But the band are from the land of the deep dish pizza and Kanye West so I think the issue is Chicago as a whole.
The Curls’ debut album Slice of Life is if Arcade Fire weren’t Canadian and instead did “midwest schlub rock”. It’s not the sleazy Pizza Punk that I typically like and would associate with by looking at the art work, but instead has a more of an eccentric edge to it.
\\Slice Of Life//
The opening two tracks give a full range of their instrumentation with ‘Shut The Fuck Up’ juxtaposing crooning calls of ‘shut the fuck up‘ and sharp ‘la da dah dah dahs‘ over classic one-two Jazz chord progressions.
The sort that you’d most likely hear at a hotel lounge session that you couldn’t make it to, but it’s okay, because you’re a Hilton Platinum member so you got your refund and now you can make French Martini’s from home and look down on the windy city from your penthouse, and wonder what would have happened to your band if you had actually dropped out of business school like all of your other friends…
‘Couch Song’ is easy going and reminds me of The Sims for some reason – maybe because it has a smooth lazy feel to it?
The Curls’ USP is definitely the inclusion of horns and this is their “Make it or Break it”. To some, the horns may ruin the sound and I wonder if I’d enjoy the music more without the horns, but they seem to work because they have their own character – they give a breeze that other bands don’t have, yet they can become a bit intrusive and this is maybe because we’re not used to hearing horns in Indie and “schlub rock’.
‘Shiny Red Apple’ is actually the shining red apple of the album. It’s sweet and jangly in The Curls’ own way and it’s sleepy and comfy and doesn’t way itself down in all of the instrumentation that the band pump into each song.
The track is well balanced and if the rest of the songs could work so succinctly in their dynamics as on ‘Shiny Red Apple’ then Slice of Life would be getting delivered to my front door so often I’d be best friends with the delivery guy.
‘Death’s Breath’ is where I reach my point of ‘do I want to listen to this album again?’.
The song is great, it’s long and towers over the rest of the album but the horns just kill it slightly – after an entire album the horns feel like a gimmick, but if the album was just the first and last two songs I would be loving this. The horns would be a fresh inclusion and it’d be fun and quirky. It’s just not working out over a long play.
The Curls can maybe overdo things a little, they can maybe run themselves over occasionally, but when the band have it all together you forget that you don’t know what a Flugelhorn is and you simply enjoy the music.
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