Angst rock grows up.
There comes a point in every angst-rocker's life where he has to take a good hard look in the mirror and say, "Angst-rocker, what have you become? You used to write songs because you wanted to scream about being sad while holding a guitar. But lately, it seems like you get sad just to write another song. If you can't trust your own misery, maybe you should get out of the business."
A second-rate angst-rocker who never had "the goods" might decide to call it quits or release something kind of dancey. But a good angst-rocker who's in it to win it will do what he does best. He'll whine real loud. And he'll pour his misery into a record about how much he hates pouring his misery into records.
Cursive's Tim Kasher has done just that on their latest and best, The Ugly Organ. And rather than just dropping one or two "I'm so full of shit" disclaimers in between the songs about pills, Kasher's bloated his doubt into a big, fat concept album. A concept album that hates itself.
Omaha's Cursive is on their hometown label, Saddle Creek, along with Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, another Gloomy Gus whose last record took a similar self-referential tack. But certainly not to the degree of The Ugly Organ. This is a big, angry record frothing with all the things a growing underweight suburban boy might need to just barely make it through high school. Self-loathing, self-pity, self-sabotage, basically musical masturbation that yields an ejaculate of black bile. But with some really catchy choruses.
The second song sums the record up in its title, "Some Red-Handed Sleight of Hand," a fast-rocking disclaimer for the entire album. "And now we proudly present songs perverse and songs of lament/A couple hymns of confession and songs that recognize our sick obsessions." The sleight of hand is in the lyrics, throughout the record, effectively making it turn in on itself until it vanishes. A guy can only tell you he's full of shit so many times before you think you should heed his warning and stop listening.
And then there's the third song, the wonderfully titled "Art Is Hard." If at the end of "Sleight of Hand" you're worried Tim Kasher might be a bit down about his work, by the end of "Art Is Hard" you'll wanna play the track backwards to see if you can hear him warble "Hate My Music?Hate My Music." He sings on the track, "Well here we go again/The art of acting weak/Fall in love to fail/To boost your CD sales."
Kasher is so dispirited with the whole endeavor that you start to think, "Well, maybe he can start writing about the war or something." But then you hit "Herald! Frankenstein," a 47-second track that just builds to a single lament: "Now I can't stop the monster I've created" (remember, it's a concept album). At this point you feel like an enabler just because you bought the record.
Kasher does stray from singing about singing on occasion, but he manages to stick to the theme of crumbling facades, usually by turning his attention to when love starts to suck. The best of these are right in the middle of the record. "Driftwood: A Fairy Tale" is about a girl who tries to pretend her love for a boy isn't total horseshit; "A Gentleman Caller" is about a girl who thinks her love for a boy is total horseshit but ends up thinking twice. Both of these make the most of Cursive's sound, which is kind of The Cure filtered through a Fugazi song.
On the lyric sheet, the words to the first song are broken by the stage direction "Enter Harlequins," so it was a disappointment to find the stage free of harlequins at their recent Bowery Ballroom show. Stage directions are sprinkled throughout the lyric sheet: "Enter ghost singing" and the like. The device frames the record as a kind of Baroque stage play, and it illustrates the fact that no matter how full of shit you think you are, you'd better be willing to go balls-to-the-wall pretentious if you wanna make a good concept album.
It would've been fun to see a bunch of harlequins cavort out on stage, or something similarly embarrassing. But it was just a group of pleasant-looking white boys screaming their rock songs to a crowd full of adorable white girls with exposed navels. The band pulled off the heavy-handed arrangements of the album quite well, and Kasher's wail was plaintive and pained. They might hate their record, but they seemed to get along with their live show pretty okay.