London Shephard's Bush Empire

YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE THEIR BALLS, AT least. Curve's latest comeback is another grand attempt at cheating the odds. Critically reviled, commercially overlooked, eternally linked with Dave Stewart, they plough on regardless. Good for them.

Curve shows used to be deafeningly loud, gloriously over-egged productions banked in billowing smoke and booming guitar fireworks. This is a somewhat tamer affair, just as Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia have reigned in their Wagnerian turbo-goth thunder into the more linear, beat-driven rumble of their latest album 'Come Clean'. The current marketing line on Curve is that they invented Garbage and the Prodigy, which is somewhat fanciful but consistent with the record's demographic-friendly, post-grunge direction. With their star currently in the ascendant in the US, the band have cleverly employed a second guitarist who wears the obligatory Big Shorts. So smooth, so slick, so Curve.

Curve would be a brilliant late-'90s 'alternative' package, if only they had remembered to write a few songs. Doh! Alas, 'Dirty High' and 'Chinese Burn' come and go, nondescript slabs of sandblaster guitar and adolescent poetry. 'Forgotten Sanity' and 'Coming Up Roses' hint at structured melodies, but soon cop out with plodding grooves. Halliday may be a born star in the Geri Halliwell mould, but even her Goth Spice pout can't salvage a tune-free set like this.

Sure, it's occasionally still a splendid racket: the sound of knives being sharpened while a deep-frozen doom siren wails from atop some distant, storm-lashed battlements. Suspend your disbelief and Curve will fill in the darker corners of your imagination with effortless aplomb. And the Empire is full of people doing just that, genuine Curve fans with proper jobs and friends and everything, bellowing their approval and moshing up a storm.

So maybe we're just jaded old media whores, but the only feeling we walk away with is a numbing coldness. Because Curve seem to inhabit a zone far more clinical than Prodigy's heavy metal pantomime and even less revealing than Garbage's stadium ennui. It's not just dodgy showbiz mates which scupper Curve, nor nebulous questions of 'credibility': it is their angst-by-numbers lyrics and autopilot delivery. No risks are being taken here, no emotions bared, no connection made.

Curve are Bush with extra mascara. We can only wish them the huge, empty, meaningless success they richly deserve.

review by Stephen Dalton (nicked from 'New Musical Express', dated 16 May 1998)