What happens to something pretty when you actively try to make it ugly? Are there still traces of the original beauty, or is it lost forever? From listening to Curse Purse, the new project from Matthew Robidoux (of Pony Bones and former guitarist of Speedy Ortiz), I get the feeling that cohesive beauty may not be the goal, but when the priority isn’t cohesion other aspects can be highlighted.
Their self-titled EP is characterized primarily by harsh, industrial dins, disconnected and lazy vocals, the sound of finger nails on chalkboards; I’ll be honest, it’s not an easy listen. It’s a portal to a dark world, where nothing makes sense and there are no rules, but beneath all the chaos there is a subtle discernibility. Melodies will present themselves before being buried under a clattering of bangs, static, and screeching. “Follow me/You will see” Robidoux drawls in a lazy taunt on “Crepe Paper”, drawing us into the surrealist nightmare that he’s dreamt up.
Curse Purse put us right in the tension center of a horror film (the nightmare sequence, the build up to the monster’s great reveal), where the hand slowly reaches to open the closet door with the spooky secret behind it. We never actually find out what’s behind the door, as the EP has no real resolution or climactic moment. It exists more as a dark stream of consciousness, one that falls in and out of cohesion, as if we’ve been put into a coma, forced to sense everything around us without really being able to wake up.
Curse Purse will be released as a limited edition 12″ December 2 via Feeding Tube records. You can stream it below.
