Hypnotic, crushing doom-punk. Lauren and Nora met in the fall of 2006 while teaching at the North Carolina Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. It's really that simple and so we are going to keep it that way for now.

6 MP3 Songs in this album (29:17) !
Related styles: METAL/PUNK: Doom/Stoner Metal, ROCK: Psychedelic

People who are interested in Dead Meadow should consider this download.


Details:
When the curtains of night are pinned back by the stars⦠(The Carter Family)

Then what? An aperture opens, and we see through the transom of night into something blacker, less star-spun, another night somehow twice removed? The opening line sets a stagy scene that doesnât make much dimensional sense, but then, neither does the impossible depth of the night sky. Stargazing poses the inscrutable question of scale, which is also the fundamental question of heavy metal music. The Curtains of Night, a guitar and drums duo from the North Carolina Piedmont, take their name from the eponymous cosmic Carter Family song. But they earn their telescopic sense of scale from more terrestrial concerns, a dismantling of heavy metalâs macho mythology and a distillation of the formâs traditional bloat to the leanest architecture of pummeling rhythm and patiently unfolding riff.

The living forest is behind glass, the fauna moth-eaten. (The Curtains of Night)

The magnitude of their sound, and its miniature origins in the focused dialogue between two musicians, trumps biography. Hereâs what you need to know: the music committed to this debut disc was written and performed by two women, Nora and Lauren. That swelling, seismic guitar tone was constructed as well as conjured from the instrumentââNora built her own amp, a bespoke creature with vacuum tubes like sprouting mushrooms. Onstage it assumes a third presence and a personality; on record its spinal drone serves as a clarion call heralding the onslaught of Laurenâs colossal drumming and as a ubiquitous connective tissue that binds and buttresses the songs. The open tunings and spiraling guitar lines betray the banjos Nora also makes and plays outside the Curtains, and the keening banshee dread of her vocals, behind its metallic veneer, may owe something to the grim fire of mountain music. But if itâs the South we think we hear, Lauren further confounds cartography and scale with Lost Housesâ woozy interludes, which migrate to distant sonic spaces amid the atmospheric clatter and funereal chug of subterranean drums.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. (William Blake)

No ghoulish horror-film theatrics here, either. âTotal Dominationâ delivers exactly what it posits. At once thuggish and elegant, brutal and sexy, earthbound and phantasmagoric, Lost Houses rejects testicular metalâs face-paint pagan clowning as well as its porny Argento and Alucarda axis of female evil. The Curtainsâ avatars live elsewhere, in anonymous heroines who âsleep in armor,â armed to the teeth; in the anxious residents of âice palacesâ and âstagnant seasâ; in the tangled wood and in the overripe soil. Listen closely, and loudlyââthese six dreams dilate and contract, as dreams do, revealing the Lovecraftian landscapes beneath the snarling storm. âGather the horses,â indeed.