THE CURTAINS OF NIGHT	Photo: 2008
Chapel Hill, NC
Band members: Lauren Fitzpatrick Nora Rogers
Booking/Contact: myspace.com/thecurtainsofnight
Band Website: myspace.com/thecurtainsofnight
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 doesn't 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 metal's macho mythology and a distillation of the form's 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. Here's 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 instrument--Nora 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 Lauren's 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 it's the South we think we hear, Lauren further confounds cartography and scale with Lost Houses' 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. "Total Domination" delivers exactly what it posits. At once thuggish and elegant, brutal and sexy, earthbound and phantasmagoric, Lost Houses rejects testicular metal's face-paint pagan clowning as well as its porny Argento and Alucarda axis of female evil. The Curtains' avatars live elsewhere, in anonymous heroines who "sleep in armor," armed to the teeth; in the anxious residents of "ice palaces" and "stagnant seas"; in the tangled wood and in the overripe soil. Listen closely, and loudly--these six dreams dilate and contract, as dreams do, revealing the Lovecraftian landscapes beneath the snarling storm. "Gather the horses," indeed. RIYL: Lungfish, Melvins, Hammerhead, Om, Harvey Milk, Godhead Silo, Shellac, Charley Patton
Lost Houses October 2008 [HFQ007]
"One of the most exciting new bands in this statewide circuit of loud … Their metal is a doomy re-contextualization, slow staggered riffs cragging through and collapsing over tough, deliberate rhythms. There's a blues tenacity to Curtains of Night, too, which lends an age-old grit to their new, minimalist grit." -- Grayson Currin, Shuffle Magazine "A collection that fits perfectly into the young history of New Southern Metal … Front to back, it's a record that knows how to land punches, veering from the boots in the mud power of "The Letter Four" to skuzzed-up iterations of doomy bombast like "Total Domination." -- Robbie Mackey, The Independent "Incorporating elements of heavy arena rock, stoner metal and post hardcore, Curtains of Night forge a brutally heavy sound that stampedes through the amplifiers and tramples the audience." -- Ben Pittard, The Daily Tarheel