Cursive

"There's a struggle that I tend to have that a lot of musicians and songwriters will disgaree with me [about], and that is that this is rock 'n' roll," relates Cursive vocalist/guitarist Tim Kasher. "I've fought a lot in the past with feeling like I'm in the wrong medium because I'm not being taken seriously."

Fiction writing has always existed as a means to address ideas from a distance. Rarely do the stories deviate far from the author's viewpoint. And though Kasher's songwriting seems to have become less self-reflective since 2000's Domestica, it seems that whatever idea, value or memory he's attacking, he still plans on keeping it somewhat within arm's reach. On Cursive's positively brilliant new album, Happy Hollow, Kasher expounds on the limited ideals and fundamental bewilderment of those who've lived under the omnipresent cinch of the Bible belt. These 14 odes explore anti-Catholic ("Bad Sects"), evolutionary ("Big Bang") and sacrilegious ideas ("Rise Up! Rise Up!"). Of Kasher's overwhelming dissection of theology and glaring absence of post-romantic rage so synonymous with the band, Kasher explains, "Along with trying to keep broadening musically, we were aware that we needed to keep broadening and going in different directions lyrically as well."

For longtime listeners, lines like, "Original sin, idyllic garden/Some talking snake giving apples away/What would that snake say if he could only see us today?/Ha ha ha!" might bear a resemblance to Kasher's prior intimate outpourings, but the tune falls in line with Happy Hollow's questioning of theoretical improv, all comfortably stressed from within the confines of one small American town: Happy Hollow. Cursive has always been a model of imprecision, musically speaking. Their songwriting lends itself more, as Kasher points out, to challenging themselves, rather than trying to sound aggressive.

"We've said a lot in the past that this isn't us trying to play hard rock or play aggressively, but instead we just try and tackle ideas and this is the way that we want to present them—by presenting them aggressively," explains Kasher. "I think somewhere in the core we just want to question ideas and question ourselves."

Ryan Prado

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