Shower Curtain – words from a wishing well (2024)

Review by Jennifer Kelly: Victoria Winter coos softly in a vortex, her baby-talking sweetness pushing up through blistered waves of guitar dissonance. Shower Curtain swerves and swirls around her, passing shoegaze and heading to the noisiest regions of grunge. This is the first full-length for Shower Curtain, once a bedroom solo project for Winter, now a full-fledged band. The softness derives, perhaps, from the Brazilian-now-Brooklyn-based singer’s home taping origins, the wall of skree from her new vantage in front of a band. You can hear both in “Edgar” the late album track dedicated to Winter’s ailing cat. The cut begins in a slithering shimmer of guitars. Translucent layers of sound refract and reflect each other, throwing off rainbows. The bass pads along in fur slippers, solid and grounding at whispered volume. All light, all clarity, all keening angelic vocals, until suddenly the guitar tone blisters. It burns a rough hole through the ecstasies, sends acrid smoke through aurora borealis tones. “Stay here,” Winters sings, to the cat we assume, but it’s all slipping away, disintegrating into feedback. “Take Me Home” is likewise a slice of heaven dipped into battery acid, the churn of distorted guitars obliterating delicate layers of melody. Even the relatively contained “Wishing Well,” strands Winter’s pristine warble amid a threat of creeping, slinking, evil-sounding guitars. “I thought you wished me well,” she reiterates, an airy draft of melody amid turbulent currents of noise, and you can hear that illusion dissolving into chaos. Shower Curtain is often compared to classic shoegaze for the way that vulnerable girl song rides a roiling surf of noise, but those connections only go so far. Instead, you’d be better off reaching towards the grunge-y soundscapers, Smashing Pumpkins, even Nirvana, to get at how fragility and self-revelation can collide with towers of dissonance, neither losing its character in the process. — dusted

Track List: 01 - benadryl man 02 - wish u well 03 - take me home 04 - you're like me 05 - tell u (interlude) 06 - bedbugs 07 - starpower 08 - put me on a shelf 09 - edgar

Media Report: Genre: indie-rock, shoegaze Origin: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)

Note: If you like the music, support the artist