WHAT can you give to the band that has everything?

You can, I suppose, give credit where credit is due.

Curve have made an album, their second. I could tell you that it's like their previous records, only more so, but that would be meaningless. Everything Curve do is more so.

If you know Curve, you will know what you're getting here. Their name is an indie talisman, a gold standard for "alternative" music. Some see Curve as a triumph of technique; some as a victory for hollow artifice. They are both. And technique this precise, artifice this fine, are deserving only of praise when applied in the way that Curve apply them.

For Curve - the product, not the people - are nothing less than a perfectly functional emotional simulacrum.

What goes in at one end, nobody knows. Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia would certainly claim that there is nothing contrived, nothing fake, in the feelings that inspire their music. There is no reason to question this; no call to discredit Curve's motives. It makes it all the more astonishing that what comes out at the other end should seem so brilliantly contrived, so fabulously fake. This is quite an achievement; and no, l am not being in the least bit sarcastic.

Many bands can feed on raw emotion and spew it out at their fans in much the same form as it started. But Curve - Curve can clothe naked feelings in a sleek, translucent cover, like a polythene raincoat, and render them that much more lurid. Whereas Come or Polly Harvey make peeping toms of their listeners, a Curve audience feel no more guilty of voyeurism than they would do watching a sleazy, glossy, high-brow French movie.

And "Cuckoo" itself? "Cuckoo" is a marvel. Curve have excelled themselves; or rather, become the idea they had of themselves. No one understands better the art of the permanent crescendo.

"Cuckoo" is an album about "madness and despair", the now commonplace currencies of dark pop music. But "Cuckoo" doesn't rave or rant or rage. it glides, as it must, being the creation of a band who play the studio with more finesse than almost any other. "Cuckoo" is the sound of a disaster happening to someone else. It never unnerves; it consistently overawes. When we refer, tritely, to a work of art as "powerful", we mean it moves us. "Cuckoo" is immensely powerful and if it does move me, it does so like a Japanese express train, so smoothly and with such velocity that l don't even notice.

It takes several listens to even begin to separate the tracks - on the LP credits, for "production" read "lubrication". "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" arrives like a steroid-fed take on Massive Attack's "Safe From Harm", predicting that "we won't be happy till we kill each other". I have to differ with its rationale; the whole reason men and women can't get on together is because we're from the same planet.

Holograms don't come much more menacing than "Turkey Crossing" and "Sweetest Pie", both worthy of Steven Spielberg. And the Cocteau-ish "Left Of Mother", with its nagging motif of "how about that", comes as close as Curve probably ever will to suspending my disbelief.

So what can I offer Curve? My admiration, my astonishment, my awe, my breathlessness and quickened pulse, anything, really, except my involvement. And I think no less of them for that.

review by David Bennun (nicked from 'Melody Maker', dated 11 September 1993)

you can read more reviews by David at his site : http://bennun.biz