“You have to be up on the sun to view the marquee moon!”
Burning Curtains know this to be true. A band, a Bay Area force of songwriting living on the torn fringes of tradition and interplay - near the leaky faucet of the house of rock - Burning Curtains bring a flood of creativity flowing from the brain and heart to hands set on ruckus while dancing to a Creedence Clearwater Revival choogle. With so many changes and adjustments at just the right moments, each member is a vet at their helm, leaving you thinking the song will implode while bringing back a place of comfort. Two guitars interweave to sound like ten in battle, drums come at you from all directions, bass grooving through, never satisfied with just keeping time in a world full of chaos.
With familiar influences, yet sounding like an oddity amidst it’s synth-soaked landscape, “Plague Waltz” is an ode to the teachings of John Prine wrestling with a world Camus envisioned, which 2020 and the introduction of COVID19 provided. The band loved watching an audience react to them with wild looks of confusion, smiles, unsure of what to make of it all, but eventually seeing four players exploring the limitless waves of musical passion presenting itself through songs made for Venus’ plateaus, with guiding lights of elevation, timeless spirit, boundless love ... PEOPLE!!! These curtains are not torn, they are on fire!
The songs on their debut album melt into your mind, comfortable in their own skin. “It’s All Just Stuff” is a focused balance of punk and garage veering into Stooges experimentalism, spouting a surreal but heightened lyricism. “Up All Night (Down All Day)” croons on a line somewhere between drug abuse and parenting, echoing a garage-pop, anthemic pulse. “Those Simple Little Things” is a swaggering mountain of freeform expression dripping in sweaty rock n’ roll. Put this debut album on and you will hear the past 40 years of rock poured into a blender on high, ghosts swirling into future forms. Inhale each song, let the smoke pass through the lungs and live in the heart, exhaling little at a time.
This is a record on the outskirts where plants have been wildly growing: Andrew Kerwin watering ferns, Steve Oriolo talking to snails, Tyson Vogel scaling redwood bark, Scott Rideout melting somewhere into the desert; the sprinkler has been left on for years. Riff after riff, beat after beat, all conceived in the heady waters between San Francisco and Oakland, planted and recorded live between two Studor reel-to-reel 4 track machines in the damp Pacific Northwest, supervised by the elusive Captain Tripps of Nudity and Milk Music fame. Burning Curtains’ self-titled debut is an embrace and a bath of sonic freedom to be played in any, but especially our now, complicated time.
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