It seemed unlikely that England's short and silly tradition of black-eyeliner posturing could reach any apotheosis at all, much less one as brilliant and harrowing as Curve, the enigmatic pair whose single "Ten Little Girls" – beat-driven British sludge rock with a rap break – scored some surprise airplay on stateside radio. But Dean Garcia and Toni Halliday dispense with the eminently dismissible genre's cheapest tricks and turn the rest into something entirely respectable – rock ripe for the dancing, grunge that sparkles as it chums.

Curve looks to the canon of horror and death and paranoia as an emotional place to start. If the ability to scare the shit out of a grooving audience is a difficult high-wire act, Halliday's eerily supple voice manages half of that on its own. The album's first single, "Fair Accompli," features the singer at her J&M Chain best – pained and ominously sexy as she drones, "I've come to make you feel old." Elsewhere, with equal conviction, Halliday chants prettily, backing herself with Cocteau Twins-like washes of sound on "Ice That Melts the Tips," and sneers nastily on the self-explanatory "Wish You Dead." "Already Yours" shows off an unexpected, piercing falsetto that recalls Sinéad O'Connor, but Halliday is entirely more abrasive, more sensuous, more threatening. And all the time, like a bunch of loony-bin orderlies doggedly ignoring a ranting patient, guitars grind and grind behind her, though never disguising the songs' transcendently lovely melodies. Doppelgänger is like a fuzzy nightmare from which you wake up dancing. (RS 630)

ARION BERGER