Curve (band) - Music Style and Influence

Music Style and Influence

For the most part, Curve's music was typified by heavy beats and densely-layered guitar tracks set against Halliday's sometimes airy, sometimes intense vocalizations of lyrics that frequently explored topics such as alienation, addiction, lust, romance, and love on the wane.

The band's early releases were either lumped in, by certain British music reviewers, with the then-popular shoegazing style of guitar-based rock music, or said to borrow heavily from Gothic rock.

Curve second LP Cuckoo was noted to feature a broader set of influences, such as industrial and electronica. On Come Clean and the records that followed, the electronic portions of the band's music became more prominent, to the extent of some recordings from the final years featuring hardly any guitar sounds.

With regard to the group's significance to the development of alternative rock and pop music, it has been claimed by some Curve aficionados and music writers that British/American alternative rock band Garbage were inspired by some parts of Curve's musical template. Toni Halliday has occasionally commented on the comparisons between both groups, stating at one point - in an interview conducted by Volume magazine in 1996 - that she could "see bits of Garbage in what we've done, just like we see bits of Sonic Youth or the Valentines or really any band that was doing something supposedly outside the norm. In a way it's very flattering to be tied in with (Garbage drummer and co-producer) Butch Vig, not just because he's a brilliant human being, but because he's a brilliant producer, and he's worked on some of our favourite records. But eventually Garbage are a pop band, and Curve were never a pop band".

Halliday has, on other occasions, also offered contrasting opinions. Interviewed by Cosmic Debris Magazine in 2001, she reminisced on how " put records out and we always thought they were nice little pop albums full of nice little pop songs. I've always thought that Curve have made great pop. It might come in a different guise to what people presume is pop, you know, like... it doesn't sound like Backstreet Boys pop, but still, there's melody there, and there are hooks, and we've done that on every record we've ever made. We've been called 'goth' in England, and we've been called 'noise merchants' and the whole gamut of labels, but not once have we been called a pop band, and I'd really like to be called that".