This is a compilation of Curve’s first three EPs, the Blindfold EP, Frozen EP, and Cherry EP, plus an extended version of the song “Fait Accompli”, and was released in the U.S. a few months after the debut studio album Doppelgänger. It’s a heady sonic brew of dynamic beats, restless electronics, stormy, but crisp guitars, catchy choruses, and layered, melodic vocal phrases – the template for all of Curve’s output. Despite the album being a compilation of sorts, it holds together quite nicely and provides a good look at the band's work up until its debut release. Much of the material is produced by the band and Steve Osborne, and isn't nearly as dense as Curve's debut, which benefited from their work with Flood. The non-focus tracks of the EPs are every bit the equal of the songs that eventually found their way onto Doppelgänger, with many of them being true gems. "No Escape from Heaven" features a sultry vocal performance by Toni Halliday over a galloping percussive beat and drive-by bursts of guitar. And "Cherry" is the high point of this collection. The song starts out quietly with hushed vocals and subtle keyboards before the drums signal a blast of fuzz guitars and everything crashes into a riveting sound collage.
The band released three EPs in rapid succession in 1991 on Anxious Records to great acclaim from the British music press, (did you know that Dave Stewart was the unlikely orchestrator of the formation of Curve. Toni Halliday was signed to Stewart’s Anxious label and Dave Garcia had played bass guitar in the live Eurythmics tour band) and Curve was summarily tagged with the shoegazer label due to the band’s rise during the heyday of this musical genre, and because early songs featured lengthy, richly-layered, guitar-driven soundscapes.
By sounding darker and more dangerous than the American-Scottish alternative rock band Garbage, Curve distinguished itself from the shoegazer style by creating songs that melded varied musical influences, from electronic and dance beats and loops, to darker gothic shadings, to catchy dream-pop hooks, to intense industrial noise. An onslaught of swirling guitars buried beneath a throbbing rhythm of distortion seamlessly rubs up against tumultuous, coruscating electronics, with Toni’s glacier-cool, but vivid vocals, alternately menacing and beguiling, flowing through the dense sonic mesh.