A junkyard band with a heart of dirt, smoke, and wires; The Curious Mystery blends Sixties-style psychedelia with American country-blues and garage experimentalism. Cool night air, slow burning heaviness, impregnation by blackberry, Captain Beefheart, late night crawlers, native fowl, dinner, river blindness; these are some of the things The Curious Mystery bides its time thinking about. A stranger in a new town, Rotting Slowly [KLP206] is their debut album.

The Curious Mystery place an emphasis on dense sonic texture and unorthodox song structures. The band began in 2005 in Seattle where Shana Cleveland, a Midwestern daughter of Blues and Country rock musicians met Nicolas Gonzalez, an experimental instrumentalist from Texas. Today the band features Nicolas on guitar, vocals, and homemade instruments; Shana on vocals, banjo, guitar, and autoharp; as well as Faustine B. Hudson on drums, gong, dinner bell, plastic tube; and Bradford Button on the bass guitar.

Rotting Slowly has a vast implied distance and textural tension, canvassing canyons and turning tight corners. Cleveland and Gonzalez split vocal duties; hers is silky, his familiar and they wind around each other in an organic swirl of skeletal percussion, tangled guitars, Eastern drones and multiple tempos. "Black Sand" is forward-driven, clamoring for release; "Go Forth and Gather" is a mosaic obscura; the instrumental "Nicaragua" creates a thick, uncertain haze; "Strong Swimmers" has a playful springboard guitar-plucking; and "It's Tough" is a diseased-themed doo-wop that fades into a deservedly soothingly distant Morricone porch chant.