Curve - Pubic Fruit

Pubic Fruit is a 1992 compilation album by the English alternative rock band Curve, designed to introduce American audiences to their early sound by combining three acclaimed British EPs—The Blindfold, The Frozen, and The Cherry—along with an extended remix of "Faît Accompli". The collection highlights the band's pioneering blend of distorted shoegaze guitars, industrial rhythms, and melodic vocals, serving as an essential, cohesive introduction to their formative era.
Musically, tracks like "Ten Little Girls" and "Coast Is Clear" showcase the fusion of heavy guitars and electronic beats that influenced the 1990s industrial rock scene. It serves as an ideal entry point for exploring Curve's influential sound prior to their debut album, Doppelgänger.

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.

Ripped to MP3 @ 320

1. Ten Little Girls

2. I Speak Your Every Word

3. Blindfold

4. No Escape From Heaven

5. Coast Is Clear

6. The Colour Hurts

7. Frozen

8. Zoo

9. Clipped

10. Die Like A Dog

11. Galaxy

12. Cherry

13. Faît Accompli (Extended Version)