The term 'posthardcore" is a nifty little rock-crit catchall, isn't it? You can use it on just about any band whose sound makes you suspect they may have owned a Bad Brains record, heard a Quicksand tune or seen a Fugazi show at any point during their lives. Also, it's a relatively innocuous assignation for punk groups who've developed dynamic melodies and hooks to go with their noise but get all bitchy when you call 'em emo.The drawback to such a broad definition is, well, that it doesn't really define anything, right? Older, more pointed after-the-wave genres like post-punk or post-bop are much narrower. They refer to artists who use the styles as a jumping-off point, and take those elements' facets to daring, even startling new places.
Like Omaha's Cursive, for instance.
Over the last few years and albums, this lauded quintet has been screwing around quite heavily with the elements of their hardcore influences, and with the ambitious new full-length The Ugly Organ, may have left them behind completely. The group's Saddle Creek Records bio calls The Ugly Organ "an operetta of sexual and emotional confusion and conflict set to a musical backdrop that mirrors and expresses the entire range of emotions involved."
Huh? Basically, it's a tense, dense and wildly eclectic quasi-concept album chronicling a songwriting protagonist's growing disenfranchisement with sexual relationships — a literate indie companion to the lurid pulp of The Afghan Whigs' Gentlemen that evinces no regard for what posthardcore audiences are used to hearing.
Well, some regard, actually.
"A year and a half ago, I was feeling pretty self-conscious about the record, that it was something that was too closely related to what we think is good music, or is our very own interpretation of music," says Cursive vocalist/guitarist Tim Kasher. "And then you're kind of putting yourself out there so far that you're concerned that nobody else is gonna follow it. But that's what every songwriter should be doing, should be striving for. Asking me now, I feel more comfortable about it, because it's been received really well. Which was a surprise for us, but a good surprise."
As a lyricist, Kasher has some experience with listeners reacting to his work in ways different than he'd intended, or hoped. Known for intensely personal subject matter — everyone agrees that the last album, Cursive's Domestica, dealt with Kasher's divorce, but to what degree depends entirely on who you're asking — he nonetheless approaches intimate details from oblique and clever angles, shrouding the reality in archetype and satire. The resulting mix of myth and actual experience can be interpreted in any number of ways, with what's fact and what's fiction ultimately dependent to the audience's individual perception.
"I always hope that the listener is intelligent or mature enough to decipher that for themselves, but I also know that that's not necessarily the case. I'm not slamming an audience by any means," he says, "but in the past, some of the satire's been lost on people. I guess, at some point, we wash our hands of it. If somebody can't decipher that, that I actually rehash things to deal with or examine them in songs, then so be it. There's nothing I can do about it."
The Ugly Organ's lyrics are rife with multilayered references to genitalia, sexual dalliances and bad songwriting; it's easy to see why some listeners have a hard, or at least extremely subjective, time deciding what's real and what's not. While the themes showcase a tighter focus for the band, the apprehension and confusion found therein are moods with which longtime Cursive fans are well familiar.
"At the core, what we express on every record deals with tension, frustration, paranoia, aggression, stuff like that. The lyrics lend themselves to those kinds of ideas," Kasher surmises. "The other records, in my opinion, were as perverse as some of these songs are. It's more of an unusual, internalized sort of frustration … kind of the weirder side of it."
It's in the music that Cursive, and The Ugly Organ, make a marked departure from the band's catalog and comfortable posthardcore sounds in general. From the opening organ strains through the closing choir, Kasher, bassist Matt Maginn, drummer Clint Schnase, guitarist Tim Stevens and newly permanent cellist Gretta Cohn deftly manipulate idiosyncratic instrumentation, clashing yet complementary parts and tightly controlled dissonance to deliver punk's visceral impact without employing a single one of its cliches. Multiple listens are mandatory; what seemed jarring the first time may be your favorite element of a song by the fourth. It's about as far removed from popular music as music can get, while still retaining recognizable song structure and hooks.
According to Kasher, The Ugly Organ's ambitious final product was the result of thorough pre-production and a unanimous desire to test the group's boundaries.
"There was a dialogue throughout about where we were going with it," he says, "trying to make something more well-rounded altogether as far as dynamic, dark and light and heavy and soft, something more complete than what we've done in the past."
In the band's efforts to push both their talents and the envelope, they've succeeded in creating something not only unique and challenging, but also cohesive, compelling and listenable. Indeed, The Ugly Organ seems to be resonating with fans far better than even Cursive could have hoped. The disc debuted at No. 16 on college-music bible CMJ's Top 200 chart last week, and received a four-star review from Rolling Stone in a rare display of underground cognizance by the magazine.
But in the mind of Kasher, the band wasn't gambling, or making a bid for successful esoterica. They were just making the record they wanted to make.
"The idea is to write what you write," he says. "And then, after, you can hope that that's what people wanna hear, you know?"
Music critic Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2003.