The Sound of Curves – Gone Gatsby
The Sound of Curves is a four piece from San Antonio featuring Leonel Pompa on vocals/guitar and keyboards, Roger Maher on vocals/bass, Josh Leija occupying the drum stool, and Aaron Montano-Teague on lead guitar.
Their latest release entitled Gone Gatsby is the band’s third release and will likely stand as a major leap forward for this Texas unit. The fourteen songs on the new album cover a variety of styles and textures, but the alternative rock core of their sound will remain their calling card for fans and it’s quite entertaining throughout. This isn’t a band content with conjuring the familiar, putting their music through the same tired poses countless other bands have adopted, and hoping formula will win out in the end.
Instead, The Sound of Curves clearly hopes to write and record impactful music that reflects them as individuals rather than commercially minded musicians groping for fortune and fame. Perhaps fortune and fame will find them based on the quality of this release. If so, they will have arrived there on their own merits.
One of the band’s defining musical qualities is their use of vocal harmonies. This isn’t a typical element in the guitar rock template they adopt for much of their work, but the juxtaposition of Pompa and Maher’s vocals against the former’s guitar work with lead player Montano-Teague gives them a sound all their own.
It’s easy to hear this illustrated in songs like the opener Galaxy and the title song. The opener is much less commercially oriented, but even the audience-participation raise your fist and be heard anthemic leanings of the title song give it instant mainstream cachet.
Summer Radio is a particularly exuberant number with the same trademark vocal harmonies heard throughout the album. The vocal melody is a little faster, snappier, here than elsewhere and the gradual escalating guitars have the same bell-clear, yet warm tone heard elsewhere.
Josephine features, arguably, the album’s most readily memorable melodies. The primary melody bringing everything else together comes courtesy of the guitars and breathes with as much life during the full band verses as it does during the comparatively lean, bare bones introduction.
The guitars have a genuine bluesy bite during the song London, especially near the beginning, and the unerring beat laid down by Josh Leija is a big reason for this song’s success.
The arrangement of Midnight is invested with a certain amount of moodiness, but the intensity is tempered by the song’s energetic tempo and vocals.
The same habit for creating grand cathedrals of sound on earlier tracks returns for the penultimate cut The Road. The subject matter is relatively familiar to anyone with experience following rock bands, but The Sound of Curves stamps it with their own individual spin. The addition of ambient accompaniment, via sound fx, is a welcome ingredient in the mix and elevates the performance’s ultimate effects.
The album’s final song Whiskey Wrongs trots out some retro musical and lyrical tropes, but the story here is how well they subsume such elements into their much more modern sound and make those clichés ring out as something filtered through their own experiences and skill.
Gone Gatsby is a mightily impressive third effort for this South Texas based outfit and amply shows there’s plenty of life left in rock and roll.
9 out of 10 stars
[soundcloud url=”https://soundcloud.com/the-sound-of-curves/jospehine” params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true”/]
If you enjoyed a sneak peak from The Sound of Curves latest album Gone Gatsby, give them a like on Facebook by clicking here & a follow on Twitter by clicking here.
