CURVE BALLS (5)

And so we reach the final part of this mini-series as after this, I don’t have any of Curve‘s later singles on vinyl.

Just over a year has passed since the remix of Horror Head, during which time Dean Garcia and Toni Halliday worked on writing songs for a new album.

The first of the new material appeared on 23 August 1993, consisting of a new single and four other tracks spread over 12″ vinyl and CD.   The release was called BlackerThreeTracker, and here was what was on the vinyl:-

mp3: Curve – Missing Link
mp3: Curve – On The Wheel
mp3: Curve – Triumph

Is it more of the same or is it different from what had come before?   My own take is that Curve had moved on from the more gothic nature of many of their earlier songs, but in doing so it feels as if they lost that special little hard-to-describe ingredient that made them so appealing.

Sadly, I don’t have any reviews from the weekly music papers to offer on this occasion to see if they agree with my take.  There are mixed reviews of their second album, Cuckoo, which was released a couple of weeks later and which included Missing Link as one of its ten tracks.  The new single did come in at #39 which was in keeping with many of the previous chart positions of EPs and singles, but the album only reached #23, which was twelve places lower than that of the debut.

It would all lead to a fair bit of disenchantment, and Curve broke up in early 1994, albeit they reformed a couple of years later, going on to release two further studio albums and a handful of singles, but they never managed to replicate the success of the initial era.

Here’s the promo video for Missing Link:-

JC