THE trouble with a lot of these session albums is that they don't appear to offer you anything tastier than slightly less slick versions of songs which you already own. "Radio Sessions" does little to reverse this tendency.

"Ten Little Girls" opens the proceedings with no apparent sense of purpose other than to remind us what a marvellously blood-curdling cacophony the "Blindfold EP" was. The radio version, though, recorded around the same time, is notable only for the annoying loud clank of some f***er banging a tambourine in the right hand speaker.

The March '91 songs never quite manage to break out of that same-but-not-as-good rut, although the more recent session on Side Two more closely approximates the acrid terror that pervaded "Doppelgänger" and last year's monumental live shows. "Horror Head" ingeniously employs every hackneyed goth guitar lick I grew up despising, and somehow manages to infuse them with vitality.

Part of the reason for this, of course, is the perpetually disgusted manner in which Toni Halliday intones her lyrics. If at times her voice verges on the insipid (though I prefer ghostly), the guttural rumble of the Curve drumbox and her allusions to all manner of witchcraft smother "Split Into Fractions" with a fearsomely askew neurotic doom.

Ultimately, though, "Radio Sessions" gives you nothing that Curve's small-but-perfectly-formed back catalogue hasn't already mesmerised you with.

review by Peter Paphides (nicked from 'Melody Maker', dated 5 June 1993)