Curve, “No Escape from Heaven”

Man, oh man I loved me some Curve back in the day. And by “back in the day” I mean “for most of the 1990s.” I distinctly remember seeing them on 120 Minutes one Sunday night, on the TV in my parents’ finished basement. The video would have been “Horror Head” (below). If you read these posts with any regularity, you’ll know I don’t always get stuff like this right. But this time I nailed it: 120 Minutes Archive reports that MTV aired “Horror Head” exactly once, on June 21, 1992. I most certainly was home from college for the summer, and I would have been plunked down in the dark, wrapped in a blanket with the AC blowing over me, watching MTV on that Sunday night.

I love that I first heard Curve just after midnight, on the day of the year when the sun rises highest in the sky. It’s fitting. There’s a darkness to this band, and a blinding brightness, too. And for reasons I’ll explain below, I associate Curve with summertime.

Shortly after digging on that “Horror Head” video, I ran out and bought their first full-length, Doppelgänger. I played the hell out of it and grabbed the follow-up, 1993’s Cuckoo, at the first opportunity. In the meantime, I’d also bought their Pubic Fruit compilation, which accommodated the earlier Blindfold, Frozen, and Clipped EPs on a single compact disc. These three CDs were enough to last me for five years, until Come Clean issued in 1998. I won’t say I had nothing but Curve churning through the Discman in the ’90s, but I tended to have at least one of the CDs in transit with me at all times, because they sounded so good—all-swallowing, really—in the cans. And for a kid who in any given moment was (and still is) seeking out ways to abstract himself from the outside world, this was a perfect prescription.

Usually Curve gets lumped in with the shoegaze bands, but of course all of these acts—or at least the good ones—have signature sound elements that make them distinctive, notwithstanding the massive fill-the-room guitars they share in common. In Curve’s case there were two notable components: namely, Toni Halliday’s revenge-on-ice vocals and Dean Garcia’s electronic programming. So when I look back on what would have softened me up for Curve, it’s not just Cocteau Twins and Chapterhouse on the swirl-of-guitars side of the equation—it’s also Eurythmics and Front 242 and Nine Inch Nails.

Eurythmics are front of mind for me on this subject, after I learned the other day that Dean Garcia toured and recorded with Annie and Dave in the early ’80s. Now I’m reading that in fact Dave Stewart introduced Dean to Toni, backstage after a Eurythmics show in Hammersmith. These facts have unlocked all sorts of observations, to the point that now I’m prepared to announce that Curve were the sadly overlooked Eurythmics of the 1990s. Consider that both acts consisted principally of platonic co-ed songwriting duos, with the XX on vocals and the XY on guitars and electronics. Annie and Toni were the cold and glamorous contraltos, and Dean and Dave were studio geeks, Dean having studied under Dave. And they worked from the same mission statement, which was to deliver challenging, mysterious, and intense pop songs. Brighter and more tech-positive, Eurythmics’ music stands for—and helped to define—the 1980s. By contrast, Curve is darker, sludgier, and more complicated, in keeping with the decade that followed.

Stacked-thick distorted guitars over slamming drum beats, with dashes of Goth and take-no-prisoners lyricism—this is of course the formula for Garbage (capital-G, smartass), except that Curve got there first and did it better, louder, and with greater conviction. Which are probably three reasons why Curve never meaningfully charted in the States. I say “meaningfully” because Doppelgänger, Cuckoo, and Come Clean did check in at 18, 18, and 26 respectively on Billboard’s “Heatseeker” charts. “Heatseeker” rankings were specifically directed to “new and developing” artists. The fact that Curve continued to qualify as “new and developing” over a period of six years is telling.

The first Garbage record came out in 1995, smack in the middle of the five-year hiatus between Curve’s second and third LPs. Before he linked up with Shirley Manson, Butch Vig produced Nevermind, which explains why self-titled Garbage plays like Cuckoo with Cobain standing in for Dave Stewart as an influence. I’m not here to say Garbage ripped off Curve, but it seems clear enough that Curve warmed up the audience and promptly left the stage for others to occupy. Had Come Clean come quickly, I may not have spent three years yelling POOR MAN’S CURVE! at my friends whenever “Stupid Girl” (Apple Music, Spotify) or “Only Happy When It Rains” (Apple Music, Spotify) played on the radio. Just imagine the course of human history, if “Coming Up Roses” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Cotton Candy” (Apple Music, Spotify) had hit instead. Hard to see how Russia would have invaded Ukraine, at least.

By far my favorite Curve track—and easily an All-Time Top Five Song overall for me—is “No Escape from Heaven” (YouTube). This is from their 1991 Blindfold EP, which is remarkable for several reasons, starting with the rap break on “Ten Little Girls” (YouTube). Track one of your first release, and you take a leap like that and stick the landing? Just today I learned who guested on this: his name is JC 001, Discogs describes him as an Asian-Irish rapper from Ladbroke Grove, West London, and in addition to Curve he has recorded with George Clinton and of course Dave Stewart. The grinding wah-wahs on “I Speak Your Every Word” (YouTube) should grab your attention, as should Toni’s monologue in “Blindfold” (YouTube):

In a conversation, talking of nothing, we were drinking sweet wine. We have become jealous, satisfied in our desolation, wrapped in our vivid dreams.

I used to think of angels, but that’s all gone. I used to dream of love and kisses, wanting to belong. And I tear around the corners, blindfolded to the world.

Hard-headed sense of failure in a narrow mind. I never used to think about the hurt I’d left behind. And now it falls upon me like winter snow, and I turn the same corners when there’s no place left to go.

Well, that’s all genius. But it’s only prelude to “No Escape from Heaven.” I could stay blanketed forever in these celestial guitars, which of course is exactly the point. Toni is in a seductive mode here—I’d like to take your clothes off and play for a while—but it’s instead the chorus, innocent and lovely, that breaks me every time:

Hold my hand in summertime—we’ll walk for miles, and you’ll be mine. Hold my hand in summertime, and you are mine.

Producer Alan Moulder contributed guitars and effects here, over top of Dean Garcia’s. Producer Alan Moulder is presently married to Toni, and while I don’t know enough of the Where and When here to connect the dots definitively, I like to think that playing together on this track was an essential part of their courtship. More than this, though, when I hear “No Escape from Heaven” I like to think of those summers in the early 1990s when I was back home from school, blasting this track on repeat over my car stereo, with the Discman in my lap to absorb the shocks of the road and keep the CD from skipping. Border-crossing into Sharon PA to pick up wings at Quaker Steak & Lube, burrowing into Youngstown to shoot pinball and listen to DJ Bart at Cedars, riding home from Perkins with a full belly just before sunrise.

I was back in Ohio earlier this week, pushing my red Tesla up and down so many of the old highways. Dialing up Curve wasn’t exactly an autonomic response to retreading these roads, but it was at least Pavlovian. On Wednesday morning I drove from Warren down to Columbus. New 82 to Route 11 South to I-80 West to I-76 to I-71 South, and something was itching me all the way down. I checked into the hotel, dropped in on the Opening Plenary Session for the conference—Irwin Chemerinsky on the Supreme Court session’s implications on higher education, if you want to know—and then I doubled back to the parking garage, with the idea of driving up to Used Kids for some record-shopping. I stepped out of the Hilton into the sun, then into the car, which felt and smelled like 50 long-gone summers inside. Presently I was driving up North 4th with the otherworldly sound of “No Escape from Heaven” pouring into the car.

Played loud enough, this song feels like an electrified violin bow, singeing and thrumming at your spinal cord. The force of the guitar tracks, paired with the top-line lyric—Hold my hand in summertime—can have the effect of tying together a thousand lost moments across the years. It turns out that sometimes, if only for a fleeting moment, you can attain the opposite of nostalgia: you can have back in your brain at least some of what has come and gone. Achieving this involves a very precise application of physics and metaphysics, and as far as I can tell the required inputs are weapons-grade sentiment and gobs of electricity, which Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia (respectively) just so happen to bring in spades on the Blindfold EP. Your mileage can and will vary here, but for me, on a Wednesday night in the Short North of Columbus, “No Escape from Heaven” worked well enough to bring me home again.

I expect it could have worked even better, if I’d ever seen them play live, but Curve are one of a handful of bands that got away from me. I just never was in town when they came through. Most notably—and maddeningly—they were on the ticket with the Jesus & Mary Chain for the latter’s Rollercoaster tour in the fall of 1992. But I was at school when they played in Ohio (in Cleveland on October 28, Setlist.fm confirms) and wouldn’t you know it, I was back home on fall break when they were finally within shouting distance of campus (in Philly, on November 8). I think Spiritualized was on that tour, too. Urgh.

In that same spirit, none of the early records are on Apple Music or Spotify. There’s a certain dignity and poetic justice to this, as it ensures that Curve are bound to, and reside exclusively in, their time: i.e., the 1990s. The three EPs, Doppelgänger, and Cuckoo are best explored on a vintage Sony clover-leaf rotary CD player, if you’ve got one. The discs should be visibly scratched but playable, with Cuckoo’s jewel box covered in dust from its twenty-plus years atop a stack in the left-side CD tower.

If, as seems likely, you don’t have the equipment or the media to play these recordings on CD, you’ll be excused for seeking them out on YouTube—because there are some real gems inside these time capsules. “Wish You Dead” (YouTube) is positively savage, and with all apologies to “Horror Head,” it was the first Curve track to smack me to attention. It might have had my vote for Doppelgänger’s first single, but you won’t hear a word of complaint from me about “Faît Accompli,” which covers similar territory, with Toni promising to crush our bones, and so on. The video is a blistering dose of ’90s tropes, with its washed-out B/W frames, slo-mo dancing shots that smell just a bit like teen spirit, and the wind blowing back through Toni’s hair. All of MTV should have looked and sounded like this, and I could watch it all night long.

The beat drops right out of “Sandpit” (YouTube), and perhaps accordingly Toni lets her guard down for a minute:

Swallowed my pride, gutted me from the inside, left me in this pool of doubt, now I don’t think I can get out. But you can laugh ’cause you think that you’re better than me.

Every five years or so I rediscover “Sandpit,” and I sit in awe of it every time. Likewise most of Cuckoo, but always and especially the gorgeous title track (YouTube) with its mid-tempo beat-throb and Dean’s paint-peeling pick slides over this confessional from Our Girl:

I was never just an ordinary girl who underwent a transformation. I always thought I could see the stars and watch them grow in my hands. But my mind was bigger than the world. My choice was being born a girl.

To feel the way I do about you has numbed me to all that’s beautiful.

Fine and I’ll take your word for it, Ms. Halliday, but there’s very little in life that’s more beautiful than what you and Dean are getting up to here.

This is not to mention the earworm in “Coast Is Clear” (YouTube, video proceeding from the same unimpeachable principles as “Faît Accompli”); the echoes of En Vogue in “Crystal” (YouTube, and also: You have squandered my love); the sheer perfection of “Think & Act” (YouTube); and a dozen other tracks.

Right about now I feel another Curve binge coming on. These happen every several years, and try as I might, there is no escape from this heaven. Far better to let it come, to clasp hands with Toni and Dean and walk for miles and miles with them. They are, after all, mine.