Doppelganger

After three EPs on Dave A. Stewart’s Anxious label, Curve dropped debut album, Doppelgänger, in 1991. It was an artistic and commercial success that just missed out on the top ten in the UK and went top 20 in the US Heatseekers album chart, no mean feats for a UK ‘indie’ act at that time. Co produced by the band – Toni Halliday plus multi-instrumentalist Dean Garcia – and Flood, Doppelgänger is a pioneering blend of electronic rhythms and distorted, reverb-drenched guitar layers, an approach that would proliferate and become widely popular after it was adopted by Garbage a few years later.

By the end of the decade, the album was being included in lists of the best “gothic” albums of all time and this century it has deservedly found its place in similar appraisals of so-called “shoegaze” records. “Every song here is swimming in guitars – mashed, chewed, flanged, compressed, squally, howling, whatever,” wrote David Cavanagh in Q magazine. “But no matter how cacophonous the music gets Halliday’s voice is terrifically sensual and seductive, sounding just the pretty side of evil.”