In 1983, Don DeLillo explored the fractured nature of modern culture through his novel American Blood, using the shadow of the Kennedy assassination to dissect how conspiracy theories shape our reality. Nearly forty years later, Chicago crypto-jam band Curls Ultra has channeled that prescient vision of hallucinatory meaning and spiritual paranoia directly into their debut studio album. The result is a sonic experience that is deliberately deranged, disorienting, and surprisingly gleeful—a true trip.
Curls Ultra doesn’t just play music; they create a twilight realm for the dangerously unhinged. With crude artwork reminiscent of a coloring-book version of a Ghanaian movie poster, their aesthetic immediately taps into the apocalyptic mindset shared by lone-wolf killers and the delusional belief systems they spawn. Song titles like God’s Lonely Man and Nothing 2 Love perfectly capture this mood, dealing with the ineffable glory of ruining one’s life.
But this isn’t wallowing in malevolent darkness. The band—comprising vocalist/guitarist Mick Fansler, SJOD (theremin, sampler, synth), Eric Novak on reeds (including the Chinese sheng) and synth, bassist/backup vocalist Dove Hollis, and drummer Steven Plock—takes this unsettling feeling and transforms it into a hot throw-down. They make dangerous alienation feel like a lunatic communion, turning anxiety into grooves.
Musically, the band achieves this by blending sounds that are simultaneously chaotic and meticulously structured. Their instrumental opening, “God’s Lonely Man,” glides and glistens like the Dead at their most kaleidoscopically crystalline, propelled by prismatic keys and a loose, propulsive rhythm section. While many tracks stretch beyond ten minutes, some moments offer blissful reprieve; for example, the unusually brief “Immediate Problem” introduces blissful synth effects and a clunky-funky bassline, punctuated by vocals that sound like Captain Beefheart battling a head cold.
On the other end of the spectrum, tracks like “Vegas (Mandalay Bay)” showcase Fansler’s froggy croon, lending dusty, piano-kissed ballads a lonesome, faintly demented, yet undeniably touching romance. Curls Ultra draw inspiration from the shaggy psychonauts of the ’60s, sharpening that hippy boogie-woogie rumble for a more dissonant and dystopian age.
They weave in echoes of German greats like Amon Düül II and hints of fellow travelers such as Cul de Sac, finding free-form sprawl in pieces like “Luxury Fragrance” and “TOAD: The Mind Prison.” Interspersed with these deeper influences are doses of goofier jammers like Phish and Ween, adding unexpected bursts of good-time energy.
Ultimately, Curls Ultra rejects simple homage or mere party atmosphere. They create something more majestic and deeply disturbing—loose, surging songs that find grooves in the unbalanced, successfully making dangerous alienation into a powerful form of art. If the poet William Carlos Williams was right when he noted that “The pure products of America go crazy,” then Curls Ultra, as an undiluted American band, are certainly going nuts.
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Credit: Spin
