not for the faint of heart
not for the faint of heart
If you’re going to do something, you may as well give it your all and if there’s one thing you can say about Cursed, it’s that it’s not half arsed. Not by a long stretch. You often hear of bands throwing everything but the kitchen sink into an album and that usually means they’ve just made a loud racket with whatever they had to hand. The Scaramanga Six, in this their sixth album, have also thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this record although here I mean that as a compliment. It’s a loud, brash, overblown, bombastic mess of an album but everything’s there for a reason. This is loud, aggressive, pretentious and occasionally bonkers but it’s not trying to cover up for a lack of talent. There’s no disguise on show here. The band wear their hearts on their sleeves throughout, along with their livers, kidneys and other internal organs. They practically turn themselves inside out, straining themselves just to perform this stuff.
It’s so ridiculously pompous, and ever so daft on occasions (especially the bit about the hooded crow in I Can See A Murder), that it comes across as a mixture of Spinal Tap and Sparks, which is rather difficult to wrap your head around. Then again, it’s a mixture of Spinal Tap and Sparks, which means it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Insane, yes but fun nonetheless.
Sometimes you’ve just got to give people credit for trying and you’ll not hear another album this year that tries harder to entertain you. Everything’s turned up to 11, even when they’re trying to be quiet. It’s loud, brash, completely full of itself, totally overblown and reckless and entirely admirable because of it. At the end of the day, you owe it to the band to give Cursed a spin. It only seems polite after all the blood, sweat and tears that they’ve put in simply to perform and record it. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure but my word is it something……..Well, it’s something, that’s for sure.
Something quite remarkable indeed.