Lost Houses

The only way I could love The Curtains of Night more is if they wore my grandmother’s homemade bread as a hat. It’s like they took a Melvins super burrito and added Kat Bjelland guacamole and made the best dinner entrée ever—with maybe a Big Business tequila chaser. Although their compositions lack some of the Romanesque eccentricities of their superannuated musical cousins The Melvins, the influence of albums such as Honky and The Maggot are acutely evident. Although their musings are perhaps less baroque in nature than The Melvins, the feculent guitar still abounds, and is magnificently aggrandized by the caustic nature of the vocals. In shorter terms: less weird, but still totally rad.

If there is a criticism, it is that The Curtains of Night seem to lack a bit of fullness that comes in a normal triad of guitar-bass-drums since they are a guitar-drums duo. I am going to go on a clichéd SNL limb here and say that I have a fever, and the prescription is more bass.

I could also use a dash of the bizarre. Don’t lay it on too heavy. Think of the Rachel Ray description of nutmeg: that little thing that makes people go, “Hmm, what is that?” (Yes, I just used Rachel Ray in a sludge metal music review. Sure, go ahead and act like you don’t watch Rachel Ray. Jesus and Santa Claus know the truth.) Of course, if The Curtains of Night did have bass and an extra splash of weird, they wouldn’t need the bread hats. They would be so perfect you couldn’t even see them, just like you can’t see God because God is perfect and you aren’t supposed to see perfection.

The Curtains of Night is a band made up of two women. As a lady formerly of a metal band made up of men and women (women on bass and guitar, men on vocals and drums), it used to irritate the hell out of me when dudes at our shows would say things like, “Wow! I never new girls could rock so hard!” To those dudes, I answer: we also have things called airplanes that can fly you to someplace where they won’t kick your ass for being a clueless turd; so I suggest you go buy a ticket if you value the safety of your testicles. A note to The Curtains of Night: if you need a bass player, I know one available in the Philadelphia region. I hear her grandma makes some pretty killer homemade bread.

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