"Don't start playing games that you can't finish," sings Toni Halliday with a flourish on 'Super Blaster', a track where she gives baleful, tingling expression to every line. Although partner Dean Garcia likes to add filth to the trademark Cure distortion, maybe it's time for them to clean up their act just a little, to allow Toni's voice to come through. Her style is intriguing, with the sweet nuances of folk and a tense, controlled hysteria unfortunately buried under Garcia's muso wall of noise.

Like the cuckoo that settles in other birds' nests, this album takes a rhythm (be it a rumbling dance beat, semi-acoustic Indian Beatles-style or straight-ahead indie rock) and sits on it. Each track is there for the duration - as in 'Crystal', one to sandblast your neve-endings - with sampled drum loops doing the rounds again and again, just in case you didn't get the point in the first bar. Sessioneers-turned-indie heroes, Curve have already established their cred, Cuckoo is a competent album with genuinely weird moments, but it just doesn't shimmer. Now maybe is the time to resurrect and take risks with some of those pop roots.

6 (out of 10)

review by Lucy O'Brien (nicked from 'Vox', dated 1993)