In my perception, Cursive has had two distinctive characteristics. The first is Tim Kasher’s conceptual and self-referential lyrics, which really came to their own on Cursive’s Domestica. The second is the presence of a cellist, which marked The Ugly Organ and their two reunion albums.
In that perspective, this is the first release in their chronology that really sounds like Cursive to me before my recent deep dive into their discography.
On paper, it shouldn’t have worked. An emo concept album about a failing relationship loosely based on the singer’s own divorce doesn’t exactly sound like a formula for a hit record.
Lucky for all of us though, Cursive’s Domestica manages to avoid all of the self-indulgence and clunky storytelling that too many concept albums fail to avoid. Instead, it shows a huge leap forward in both Tim Kasher’s songwriting and the band’s musicianship, leading to an undisputed emo masterpiece.
After their Crank! Records debut Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, Omaha natives Cursive joined up with the then-burgeoning Omaha record label Saddle Creek. In a few years time, Saddle Creek would become a staple of the underground emo-ish scene, enlisting such bands as Rilo Kiley, The Faint, and Bright Eyes to their roster.
Now, when people talk about Saddle Creek, Cursive is always one of the first bands mentioned. But on their second album, released just five years after the founding of the label, Cursive was still building their legend alongside their new label. And while it might not be remembered as one of their best works, The Storms of Early Summer: Semantics of Song is an important chapter in their mythology.
I’ve been a fan of Omaha’s Cursive for quite a while. I picked up a CD single of “Art is Hard” from my local music store in 12th grade, and I spun those two songs on repeat for weeks. I downloaded several songs from Domestica on LimeWire and burned them to my one of my many emo mixes. Through my “serious music fan” phase in college, The Ugly Organ was one of the few emo records that I still listened to regularly.
But as much as I love those records, I’ve never dug too deep into their earlier material. That is, until I bought a box of classic records from my friend Stephen that included most of the Cursive back catalog.
Conversations about At the Drive-In’s best release usually dance around a gridlock between In/Casino/Out and Relationship of Command.
However, that conversation simply cannot be complete without taking their incredible EP Vaya into consideration. While it contains absolutely no shortage of ATDI’s signature angular fury, it also sees the group adding experimental elements into their sonic palate. While it’s often described as a bridge between the two legendary full lengths, it even points to Omar and Cedric’s future in the Mars Volta with astonishing prescience.
Many years ago, I said that Relationship of Command was undisputedly the best record At the Drive-In had ever released. And while it remains my favorite, I can’t deny the fact that my 2013 claim wasn’t influenced by the astronomical price that vinyl copies of In/Casino/Out were commanding.
As fortune would have it though, I recently acquired a large lot of records from a friend that included an unreal number of classics for a more-than-agreeable price (thanks, Stephen), which included this record that, historical revisionism aside, means a great deal to me (and a whole lot more that will be reviewed in the coming days and weeks).
While the band had been active for four years before this with two EPs and a full length to their name, In/Casino/Out is really the album where they became the At the Drive-In that would become post hardcore legends.
Genre alchemy gets into diminishing returns pretty quickly. While fusion was once incredibly revolutionary, the internet has hastened the pace of these reactions so that there’s almost no crossover that hasn’t been tried.
We’re almost two decades past the advent of Girl Talk, whose genre-defying mashups saw acts like Fleetwood Mac, Ludacris, The Ramones, Lil Missy, Radiohead, Jay-Z, and Metallica featured on the same track. Babymetal debuted eleven years ago. Ill-conceived chimeras like crunkcore and emo rap are now old enough to vote. Then you have the entire crop of bands blending metal with shoegaze, post-rock, spirituals, and even Azerbaijani folk music.
Genre-bending alone isn’t enough to make compelling music.
So it’s a good thing that Ultrapop has much more to its credit, because this is one of the freshest takes on genre fusion in a long time.
For much of my life as a fan of punk, hardcore, and emo music, I have come to trust Dischord Records almost implicitly. The Ian MacKaye-founded DC label has released many of my favorite bands of the 80s and 90s, including Rites of Spring, Jawbox, Minor Threat, and of course, Fugazi. Their roster is filled with bands that practically defined post-hardcore and emo without ever falling into cliche.
And so it’s strange to me that it took me until this year to hear of Lungfish. Even among the Dischord catalog, the Baltimore art rock band sounds alien and a little unsettling—yet strangely beautiful at the same time, like a moment of spiritual transcendence.
There is a misconception I see sometimes that the better a song is, the more difficult it is to play. After all, anybody can write a simple song, but it takes someone with real talent to write something complicated. It takes real talent to play an intricate solo. It takes real talent to write a song with lots of different chords and multiple time changes.
However, there are numerous examples across the world of recorded music that disprove that theory. Bands like The Ramones or The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Add to that list Kowloon Walled City, a Oakland CA outfit that creates huge monoliths of sludge metal without much complication. While other bands might be tempted to speed these songs up or fill them with gratuitous guitar solos.
Kowloon Walled City resists these urges, trusting the strength of the crawling riffs and passionate songwriting to make Grievances a chilling statement—and rightly so.
In 2018, members of hardcore legends Have Heart and post-hardcore heroes Basement released Springtime and Blind, a stunningly tight and catchy piece of post hardcore that was as catchy as it was urgent. Despite its clear hardcore roots, there was a remarkable pop sensibility that injected each song with throat-shredding singalong passages, all wrapped up in a 25-minute package.
At the time, it seemed like a lightning-in-a-bottle record. The kind of record that was singularly excellent, even if you couldn’t quite describe why. And usually, these sorts of records prove incredibly difficult to follow up. After all, capturing lightning once is almost impossible. But twice?
Apparently it’s not that hard for Fiddlehead.