"shadows crawl from the sky, tears well up in my eye..."
It is with some trepidation that I write about "So Damned Beautiful", the third single from Curse of Lono's upcoming album "People In Cars" because this dark, pulpy song that has wonderful elements of 50's cinematic noir, 70's heartland rock, 2000's doo wop punk, sex, lust, adultery, desire and danger tied together with a sense or romance novels and classic rockisms is also informed by real pain, real tragedy and unbearable loss. At times like these, I truly feel uncomfortable translating intimate details that an artist shares. The UK artist, the man behind the Curse of Lono veil is Felix Bechtolsheimer and his press notes (bracketed below) share the dark times that inform this mind bending track.
[Preceded by news that Felix’s one-time partner had run off for another drug-filled weekend affair where her fling overdose on heroin, she died shortly afterwards by August 2020. Dealing with a deep well of emotions by this point, Felix turned to music and thus ‘So Damned Beautiful’ came to be. It’s a sordid and visceral pulp semi-fiction of lust, euphoria and bloody fingernails pumping at a breathless chest.
Recurring themes of grief and loss rise up again in this bitter pill of a track which was written from the perspective of her ex-partner’s mortal lothario. He shares: “I wrote the song from the point of view of the guy, who I didn't know, of that dirty weekend, and that overdose. When you OD on heroin you do feel pretty great until it goes wrong, so that stuff came back into the picture.”]
I, quite frankly, probably could not distill this kind of personal pain into one of my songs. It is easier to make up stories from whole cloth and while intimate details of one's life may bubble to the surface now and then you can hold onto your secret pain. "So Damned Beautiful" is drenched in a cool sort of detachment while sultry words recalling a vast emotionality drops from Felix's and Tess Parks' lips. The fictional story here as art, as catharsis, drawn in Felix's mind spins like a two sided mirror. On one side there is truth written in red lipstick and on the other fiction. If you spin the mirror fast enough the words blur into something else. The back and forth girl / boy vox and the dense layers of backing vox heighten the beauty and dark romance. I did for a fleeting moment think of Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson (Candy) although the beautifully dense bending notes that Felix incorporates into this production, like an orchestra of pedal steel guitars, and the heartfelt broken lyrics takes this to another artistic plane entirely. One that I can float in endlessly.
Recurring themes of grief and loss rise up again in this bitter pill of a track which was written from the perspective of her ex-partner’s mortal lothario. He shares: “I wrote the song from the point of view of the guy, who I didn't know, of that dirty weekend, and that overdose. When you OD on heroin you do feel pretty great until it goes wrong, so that stuff came back into the picture.”]
I, quite frankly, probably could not distill this kind of personal pain into one of my songs. It is easier to make up stories from whole cloth and while intimate details of one's life may bubble to the surface now and then you can hold onto your secret pain. "So Damned Beautiful" is drenched in a cool sort of detachment while sultry words recalling a vast emotionality drops from Felix's and Tess Parks' lips. The fictional story here as art, as catharsis, drawn in Felix's mind spins like a two sided mirror. On one side there is truth written in red lipstick and on the other fiction. If you spin the mirror fast enough the words blur into something else. The back and forth girl / boy vox and the dense layers of backing vox heighten the beauty and dark romance. I did for a fleeting moment think of Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson (Candy) although the beautifully dense bending notes that Felix incorporates into this production, like an orchestra of pedal steel guitars, and the heartfelt broken lyrics takes this to another artistic plane entirely. One that I can float in endlessly.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:
https://curseoflonoband.com/
https://twitter.com/curseoflonoband
https://www.facebook.com/curseoflonoband/
https://www.instagram.com/curseoflonoband/
https://soundcloud.com/curseoflono
Curse Of Lono’s debut album was called Severed because “I was trying to sever my [thematic] writing relationship with heroin. I made a very conscious decision, ‘I'm not talking about this anymore, I need to write about other stuff’.” On As I Fell he branched out to sing about wider topics, such as his grandfather’s experiences as a half-Jewish boy growing up in Nazi Germany and being caught up in a train crash in Leuven in Belgium in 1954. “I wanted to recreate this train crash with the instrumental orchestra music at the end.”
As Curse Of Lono’s future grew brighter - playing tours with Steve Earle, Chuck Prophet and David Ramirez hitting the Top 10 of the Americana chart; having their track ‘Don’t Look Down’ used in US TV drama Kingdom; and picking up the Emerging Artist Award at the UK Americana Awards in January 2019 – looking back was the last thing on Felix’s mind. Headline tours were selling out, fans singing along so loudly “I couldn't hear myself, I could just hear the crowd.” And a new post-country aesthetic was cohering for the third album, swapping their Delta Arcade Fire feel for a subtle, cosmic feel based around Felix’s brooding baritone, the subaqueous sound of his rare Fender bajo sexto guitar and the deep space ambience of pedal steel player Joe Harvey-Whyte. “He plays with all these country bands from America when they come over but what he really loves doing is the most mad, fucked-up ambient shit you've ever heard,” Felix says. “He goes ‘can I plug this shit in?’ And I was like ‘yes you can, please, more’.”
Then the pandemic hit, his own devastating derailment. An initial version of People In Cars was recorded in June 2020, each band member - guitarist Joe Hazell, drummer Neil Findlay, keyboardist Dani Ruiz Hernandez and bassist Charis Anderson – recording their parts individually. But, having lost his father in April, Felix began writing more songs for the record, digging deep, and recorded them stripped down with Bayston, Harvey-Whyte and Boxed In drummer Liam Hutton early in 2021.
Curse of Lono, art rock, post punk, Felix Bechtolsheimer, singer songwriter, heartland rock, sex, lust, desire, overdose, loss, pain, regret, "So Damned Beautiful", Tess Parks,
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