For Everything We Know: The Curtains

There are bands whose genius inspires me to want to create something lasting and great and moving and relevant and personal and beautiful--one perfect thing that will make all of my futile toiling on this planet seem remotely worthwhile. There are other bands whose greatness just infuriates me to the point that I never want to touch an instrument again. And then there are bands like The Curtains, who walk a line between these two extremes so thin that only the Greatest Band In the World could possibly traverse it. Because Curtains--at their best--create the music of my dreams, and that I could never dream to make.

Initially a partnership between Californians Chris Cohen and Trevor Shimizu (then called Dynathought Imagination Band), The Curtains took shape in earnest sometime between 2000-2001 when the duo absorbed drummer Jamie Peterson into the fold. This line-up dissolved almost entirely following the limited release of the LP Fast Talks, leaving Cohen--then also a member of Natural Dreamers--alone to his own devices in pursuit of the project. It was roughly around this same time that Cohen was asked to join a little band by the name of Deerhoof--this immediately following the release of that band's critically acclaimed breakthrough, Reveille. It's at this point, of course, that--in spite of chronology--Curtains immediately became relegated to the status of Deerhoof side project, an appraisal only aided by Deerhoof founder Greg Saunier's new-found membership in the band.

With drummer Andrew Maxwell (L.A.'s Open City), the new lineup recorded "Flybys"--a 23 song LP of jumpy, playful, largely instrumental half-thoughts that clocks in at just over a half hour; nine songs not even cresting the nine-minute mark. "Flybys"--which seems to limit the band largely to Cohen's single guitar, Maxwell's stammering percussion, and Saunier's hiccuped blurts from a Radioshack Moog--is stuffed painfully full of dissonant, careful conceptualism that, in spite of a great number of overall successes, never seems to gel quite right.

Following the release of "Flybys", Curtains took a brief West Coast jaunt with Japan's brilliant Maher Shalal Hash Baz (which, by the way, was one of the most inspiring shows I've ever had the fortune of attending), whose joyful pop experimentalism seemed to have a profound effect on the band's creative process. Following the release of Deerhoof's stellar Apple'O, the band cranked out Vehicles of Travel--an absolutely brilliant record which finds Curtains diving headlong into pop waters in 23 beautifully melodic vignettes. As far as experimentalists go, Curtains had always been surprisingly buoyant, but with Vehicles, the band hits a virtually perfect semblance of intentionally clunky experimental composition and nostalgic pop craft. Contextually, the songs often ring with a sort of wistful PBS jingle purity, with singing on roughly half of the songs--perhaps a turn off to fans of the band's previous, more challenging work, but a boon for bored pop obsessives like myself. Vehicles is a great deal more of a proper album that the band's previous recordings--unlike it's predecessors, who were mostly just recorded representations of the way the songs were performed live, the album's textures and layers a composed in large part during the recording process--a working method that, though apparently very taxing on the band, works to great effect.

At last I checked in with Chris, Curtains are on an indefinite hiatus as Deerhoof continues to dominate the free world--but if Vehicles is any indication, I can only pray that it's not the last we hear from the Greatest Band Of All Time.