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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.

Buy the Album HERE
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