Album Review: Curse The Son - Delirium
Reviewed by Matthew Williams
Without wanting to sound like a stuck record, but whenever I get an album sent to me by The Razor’s Edge HQ, and it’s got Ripple Music attached to it, I always get a bit excited about what I’m about to listen to. Usually, they are bands that I’ve not really heard too much from before, but they get added to an ever increasing long list of bands that I want to see live in concert, and Curse The Son are no exception to that rule.
Dan Weeden (bass) and Ron Vanacore (guitar and vocals) have been friends and writing partners since the early 1990’s, and after enduring line-up changes and traumatic personal experiences, Weeden finally joined the band in 2022. They have also integrated Vanacore’s 14-year-old son Logan to play drums after Brian Harris parted ways amicably shortly after recording had finished.
“Delirium” is their fifth album and finds the band exploring a dark, unstable world both lyrically and conceptually, whilst exploring and re-experiencing the fear, isolation, confusion and death from a time not so long ago. The slow descent into madness begins with that now familiar stoner riff, slow and atmospheric as opening track “This Suffering is Ours” just hits hard and you’ll feel your head rocking back and forth with the groove.
There’s more familiarity around the stoner sound with the truly excellent “Deliberate Cruelty” which despite the title has a more upbeat nature to the riff and then we get a cover of Witchfinder General’s “R.I.P.” which is a groovy affair, and I found myself playing air drums to this several times. “Riff Forest” seems to be quite an appropriate title, as I imagine they must have had so many riffs to plough through whilst recording. They up the pace halfway through the instrumental track, before bringing it back down again, to take the song up another level.
It's an incredibly strong opening quartet of songs for the trio, and “In Dismal Space” does nothing to dampen the high quality of songs on this album, as the bass takes centre stage with a haunting melody. “Brain Paint” is an odd little song, more psychedelic and almost like they’ve put it in there as a filler track, but it’s still very enjoyable to listen to. They get back down to what they do best with the title track “Delirium” which offers more dynamic and complex themes.
Following the very short fuzziness that is “May Cause Drowsiness” the mind-numbing heaviness is completed with a 6-minute beauty called “Liste of the Dead”. This is an album that will take you on an emotional journey, but it’ll also be an album that you’ll want to play again and again and again, as it has so much to enjoy.
