Christopher Owens formed Curls in 2005 with his then-girlfriend Liza Thorn, not long after he’d moved to San Francisco. The early version of Curls never quite took off—Owens soon found himself busy alongside Ariel Pink in the band Holy Shit—and once Owens and Thorn split, so did Curls. Owens, not one to rest on his laurels, took the songs he’d meant for Curls to new pal Chet “JR” White, revamped a lyric or three, and Girls was born. Late last year, after two LPs with Girls and three of his very own, Owens—joined by drummer Cody Rhodes and bassist Luke Baće—dusted off the Curls moniker and decided to give it another go. Owens has taken to calling this second iteration of Curls his “first… real band,” which is a somewhat curious distinction for a guy who’s been in one band or another for most of his adult life.
Still, Curls have got something distinctive on the four-song, 13-minute Vante. The EP makes for a brief reintroduction: two sweeping instrumentals and two stately pop-rockers, over and done in the time it takes to put the coffee on. Instrumentally, Vante is the most lavish-sounding Owens offering since the last gasps of Girls, brimming with rippling percussion and smears of sunset-pink synth. Owens’ solo works have veered wildly between the rinky-dink to the ornate, leaving cohesion by the wayside, but the lush, farsighted sound of Vante—with producer Shane Stoneback at the helm—is a real mark in its favor. Even with the small sample size, these four tunes really do feel like the work of a proper band: expansive, serene, unruffled.
The regal opener “Dynamite” draws back the curtain, revealing a spacious, sun-bleached city on the hill somewhere between Buck Owens’ Bakersfield and Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas. “Dynamite” manages to set a scene without saying a word, pushed along by the Rhodes’ slippery percussion and the glint and glare of those silvery synths. Next to the three-men alchemy of “Dynamite,” the jazz-inflected curlicues of “Golden Gate” feel a touch tentative. A little Grant Green here, a pinch of Lawn Boy-era Phish there, “Golden Gate” takes a beat too long to get where it’s going, and doesn’t seem to know quite what to do once it gets there. But it’s telling that Owens would spend half of Vante with the mic in a drawer. For the first time in a long time, he is putting himself and his bandmates on roughly equal footing, pushing the idea that Curls is a full-on musical unit and not simply another vehicle for Owens’ bohemian rhapsodies.
“Emotion,” the first of Vante’s two proper pop tunes, is textbook Owens: a riff you’ll swear you’ve heard before (and you have; it’s “Sweet Jane”), matched to a lyric so free of guile, you’ll want to reach out and shake its hand. The impossibly earnest, noontime-sunshine of “Emotion” presents the not-so-radical notion that feelings are meant to be felt, not avoided or otherwise blotted out. For almost any other songwriter, these gee-whiz tactics would come off like a daily affirmations desk calendar. But in Owens’ hands, it becomes a kind of hard-fought mantra, a lesson worth repeating, a return to innocence spray-painted across a wall of sound.
Lilting and luxuriant, closer “Gentle and Kind” is the best of the bunch; judiciously adorned by the pocket-orchestra of Baće and Rhodes, it floats along on a nimble melody in the neighborhood of John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels.” Owens, a little ache in his voice and his heart fastened to his sleeve, has wisdom to impart: “Please remain open in mind/Let your spirit show and grow/Let it glow,” a particularly swoony Owens sings, beaming instant karma into the universe in the hopes that a little might come back his way.
Owens hasn’t always seemed too sure of himself as a solo artist: too ambitious one minute, too scattered the next. The swift ending of Girls seemed necessary for Owens, but his music’s lacked a certain purpose without “JR” White at his side. Vante, brief as it is, suggests a course-correction; the mild meanderings of “Golden Gate” aside, the rest of Vante is sharply written, sumptuously produced, and almost totally devoid of the nervy, strewn-together energy riddling his lesser solo work. Vante doesn’t give us a lot to go on, but what’s here is promising: for the first time in years, with Rhodes and Baće at his side, Owens sounds at ease.
