Beware The Family Curse!

PURE DENIZEN
Beware The Family Curse
Posted in Uncategorized by mdouglasparish on September 28, 2009

http://puredenizen.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/beware-the-family-curse/

Word came my way recently of a new band from Seattle called The Family Curse that sounds like a great return to raw ugliness and musical irresponsibility that’s been sorely missed in music for awhile now. Crowds have been nutty and wild like no other time thanks to dudes like Dan Deacon and Lightning Bolt, but somewhere along the line, sheer noise and terror that used to haunt noise-rock in the days of Jesus Lizard and Foetus gave way to what basically amounts to pop songs blasted through cheap equipment.

The Family Curse is holding onto the cheap equipment, thank you very much, but steps back into the times when sludgy feedback and delay pedal drones were more like unruly whips and chains than the chin-scratching, wine glass-clinking curios they’ve become lately (thanks, Radiohead, I guess?). They’ve taken those strobe lights back from the neo-disco basement dance parties and stuck them back in the moldy corners of a haunted house.

Which is to say, this band is scary. On their new album, White Medicine (Fainting Room Collective), I don’t know what they’re singing about, and the song titles offer little clue: “Sewing Box,” “Teen Challenge,” “Like Lightning?” But the gist is that these dudes (and very demented singer-lady) have thrown too much trash down the kitchen sink. There are scorched Ministry drum beats,way over-distorted guitars, and this beast Megan Tweed screaming and hollering like someon locked Karen O in a Port-a-John at Ozzfest.

They stick a 13-minute-long doomscape right up at the front of White Medicine that rolls over and over like a Goblin/Butthole Surfers mash-up. There are tracks that sound like they’d be bumper music on 1994-era MTV. There’s one track that sounds like a tape-spliced church organ and glass chimes ensemble for about three minutes. All sorts of stuff that just plain doesn’t fit. I was psyched.

Have never seen this band live, but would like to. They might very well be insane mega-douches that run around spilling things on you, spitting in your face and setting themselves on fire — let me know if they are! You’d almost want them to just to live up to this album.

I’m awaiting this band’s arrival on the East Coast some day. Till then, catch them on the West Coast.