If you never thought you’d see Cursive on the cover of The New York Times Arts section like they were last Sunday don’t worry, because you’re not alone.
‘I feel like somebody at the The Times really likes us, or at least did our publicist a favor,’ quipped guitarist and backup vocalist Ted Stevens before the band’s Somerville Theatre show on Monday.
Stevens is being a bit too modest. For all the attention that Cursive should have been receiving over the past few years, they’ve been mostly overlooked, perhaps because of the rocketing popularity of their Omaha, Nebraska, neighbor and labelmate Conor Oberst, better known as folk-rock wunderkind Bright Eyes.
But now Cursive has a breathtaking new album, The Ugly Organ, and a solid lineup that is comfortable writing music together, and the press accolades have been pouring in.
‘We always think that our new release is our best yet, but for sure this has been our best received record yet,’ Stevens said.
A funny thing happened on the way to indie rock obscurity for Cursive. After two quality, yet unremarkable, emo-punk albums, the band decided to call it quits. Lead vocalist and songwriter Tim Kasher moved to Oregon with his wife, and guitarist Steve Pederson left Omaha for Duke University Law School.
All was quiet until Kasher suffered a messy divorce, moved back to Nebraska, re-formed Cursive with Stevens as the new guitarist and wrote the most intense break-up album ever, 2000’s Domestica.
Domestica put Cursive on the map. The concept album chronicles the bitter end of a marriage, sort of the musical companion to poet George Meredith’s collection of sonnets, Modern Love, or to Kasher’s real life. Kasher’s screams are so impassioned, the lyrics so personal, that it’s hard to separate the man from his art.
Which may exactly be what Kasher doesn’t want the listener to do. On The Ugly Organ, Kasher blends real life with art even more so. The album is a story within a story, a piece of musical theater (complete with stage directions in the liner notes) that partly serves as a diary of what Kasher goes through while he’s writing the song think an emo ‘Adaptation’ without the comedy.
On ‘Art is Hard,’ Kasher spits, ‘You gotta fake the pain/ You better make it sting/ When you get on stage/ And they scream your name/ ‘Oh, Cursive is so cool!” On ‘Butcher the Song,’ Kasher speaks from the perspective of a girl who’s dumping him: ‘So rub it in/ In your dumb lyrics/ And each album I’ll get st on a little more/ ‘Who’s Tim’s latest whore?”
After Domestica, the band added Gretta Cohn on cello and Kasher suffered a collapsed lung, both reasons why it took so long to release The Ugly Organ.
‘We wanted to record a series of songs that wouldn’t be a record, but would help us get to the right sound and song structure,’ said Stevens about the between-albums EPs Burst and Bloom and Eight Teeth to Eat You. ‘They were experiments that had no concept but helped us just find the right sounds. Once we got that down, things sort of took off. We rehearsed the album for six months and then Tim got sick. It took tons and tons of hours and money and time.’
Live, Cursive is tighter than they’ve ever been. Instead of Cohn’s cello merely supplementing the songs, which had been the case, she has defeated the fractured guitars to make the cello the band’s signature instrument.
The Domestica songs fit Cursive like an old sweater, allowing them the freedom to change them up a little. ‘The Radiator Hums’ became a mid-tempo ballad from an aggressive anthem, and the couplet of ‘The Casualty’ and ‘The Martyr’ was prefaced by swirling electronic noise and Kasher hauntingly repeating the lyrics to 702’s girl-power jam, ‘Where My Girls At?’
As evidenced by The Times cover, Cursive is starting to steal some of the Saddle Creek Records thunder away from Bright Eyes, but Stevens doubts that Oberst would mind.
‘We all know each other, and like family, we all get along,’ he said with quiet sarcasm.
And like an alcoholic uncle, Cursive has transformed from some messy times to become the introspective, mature figure we all knew they could be.
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