Local Review: Curious Birds – The Wheel Turns

CURIOUS BIRDS
THE WHEEL TURNS

Shapeshifting
The Curious Birds = Stevie Nicks + Yanni

Usually I don’t like neo-new age folksy acoustic stuff that mentions nature with every third breath and sings about “Persephone,” “midwinter,” “harvest time,” obscure pseudo-Celtic-Irish-Scottish mythological references and above all, a “crossroads” that is a doorway to another realm. However, like Jesse Garcia, Curious Birds are just weird enough, just left of center enough, that they appeal to me. The Curious Birds make music Harry Potter’s Professor Trelawney would listen to, and this is how she is like them: once you get past her annoying surface qualities, she’s quite loveable. One can sense Curious Birds live what they sing about. They probably have disorderly but thriving gardens in their backyards in Kamas, raise geese that all have names and eat at the dinner table, have East Asian windchimes from Dancing Cranes on the front porch, and only get around by Schwinn and snowshoe. www.shapeshifting.com.