The Curious Mystery
Rotting Slowly
Rating: 3.0
Label: K Records
Have you ever heard a band that you just don't believe could be real? Like they're something you sort of witnessed in some anonymous film and then they just kind of started showing up in your dreams? What do you mean that doesn't happen to you? Washington's The Curious Mystery sound like they stumbled out of Twin Peaks, without explanation or reason, expats from a realm that is supposedly fictional, but through the course of Rotting Slowly threatens to become very real. Tortured female vocals, epic amounts of reverb, healthy levels of tape hiss, meandering rhythms and chugging guitars: David Lynch himself couldn't have made a more fitting group for his work.
But you see, the thing is...this group that sounds out of this world? This band that seems more like a bad dream than an actual group of performers? Maybe something was lost when they crossed over into our specific time stream, but they just don't sound quite all there. As excellent as the vocals are, as interesting as the guitars can be for a moment or two, there's just nothing about The Curious Mystery that is more memorable than a dream you've just had but have already started to forget.
You really only need to hear the beautiful, melancholic "Preparations" to hear this band; every part of its formula is perfected on this track and all that follows is merely a photocopy: basically accurate, pretty much the same, but just not as good. There's a track called "Dragon's Crotch" of all things, which suitably goes nowhere and can't sustain itself outside of its OMG LOL title. For some reason, someone decided to let the guitarist sing on "Teeth of All Types" despite the fact that the only real draw to The Curious Mystery are those amazing, terrifying female vocals from Shana Cleveland.
Occasionally the band tries to switch up the formula a bit, to varying results; "Go Forth and Gather" could almost be a Neko Case song, if it weren't for the painfully out of tune guitars panned hard left; "Nicaragua" is like John Cale-heavy Velvet Underground except that it completely misses the point; "Outta California" is the best of the bunch, sounding like an exile from Meat Puppets II molesting Nina Nastasia.
But the band is young and this release does show some promise. It's impossible to overstate just how effective "Preparations" is, and if the group can channel that song's eerie calm and merge it with some of the more acrobatic moments on Rotting Slowly, they could move out of the Twin Peaks ghetto and begin to be more than a beautiful fish gasping for air out of its element.
by Morgan Davis