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Love And Curses still generates plenty of highs. Cartwright’s songwriting draws on Stax, Sun, and the Brill Building, combining a classic pop structure--simple and memorable--with a fair amount of only-got-this-studio-booked-for-an-hour immediacy.
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Musically invigorating, lyrically exciting, and thematically prescient from start to finish, Love and Curses gets my vote as the best album of 2009.
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Love and Curses is filled with great melodies that burrow deep into the skull without being cloying, and offers lyrical sentiments that tug at universal truths without pandering.
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Love and Curses features 14 songs driven by soul, strength and fierce belief, and with a voice as strong as Greg Cartwright fronting a band this tight and effective, Reigning Sound are just about unbeatable; they're one of America's great bands and they're firing on all cylinders with Love and Curses.
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Love and Curses is a rock ‘n’ roll record with neither pretense nor manicure, a clean glimpse into rock’s exposed essence.
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UncutThe results are impressive: the requisite 1960s garage cover sits happily alongside the band's traditional urgency, and their newfound classicism. [Nov 2009, p.99]
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Love and Curses sounds as much a product of the present as of the past, and the new songs attack with goblin force but vampire sophistication, thanks to another new line-up.
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Everything is in complete control, which says a lot about their zen-like mastery of the garage rock cubbyhole, but for me half the fun was the audible battle happening right there in the mix: the sweet sound of instruments bucking around, splashing cold water into cold faces.
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Love and Curses is a sound entry into the Sound discography, one Cartwright seems intent on tuning up.
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Q MagazinePotent, and strangely noble. [Nov 2009, p.112]
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MojoHis nicotine-gritted , hurt-strained voice finds a honeyed foil in Dave Amels' swirling organ, while rhythm section David Wayne Gay and Lance Willie provide R&B warmth and swinging, bar-band stomp. [Dec 2009, p. 96]