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sinceileftyoublog · 15 days ago

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Cursive Interview: Be More Eclectic

Cursive at Riot Fest 2024

BY JORDAN MAINZER

"I saw our future and I want to go back," sings Tim Kasher on "Consumers", a standout track from Devourer, Cursive's first album in 5 years and their Run For Cover debut. The line, and song in general, feels especially prescient today, given the results of this week's U.S. Presidential Election; "A billboard sells the rich to the poor," he sings earlier. It's also exemplary of the Omaha sextet's continued ability to deliver big ideas. If early albums like Domestica and The Ugly Organ took the structure of a concept album to communicate their grandiose themes, Devourer expands its reach to other genres and mediums, namely horror, to understand the world we live in. The band has said the album's title refers to consumption, in multiple denotations and connotations of the word, from our taking in of art and online spheres to literal eating. In other words, while watching films, listening to music, and reading books is nurturing, engaging in self-righteous echo chambers can be harmful. And eating and drinking is gross: "Your gut's an old garbage can / Liver's a purple bruised punching bag," Kasher sings on the forward-lurching math rock of opener "Botch Job".

When Devourer presents surreal or heinous imagery, you're more horrified by the context behind it. On "The Avalanche of Our Demise", the narrator can't fit the titular disaster, or recognizing the climate crisis in general, into his busy schedule. "Never mind the ticking clock / Besides, you’re totally swamped today," Kasher sings. “Life’s an abscess or apple pie / So shut those demons up / And devour your slice,” he sneers on "Bloodbather", his vices overtaking his desire to self-improve, Pat Oakes' drums propelling the song along as if to encourage Kasher like the devil on his shoulder. On "What Do We Do Now", a beached whale ends up on a neighbor's curb, and the narrator is mostly concerned with reporting it to his homeowner's association. Throughout Devourer, the characters attempt to reconcile their own importance with that of the world at large, man and nature. We can see they'll eventually come up empty.

Of course, the band itself, especially on stage, continues to blare inspirationally. At this year's Riot Fest, they performed the Devourer songs expressively, Patrick Newbery banging on the keys during "Botch Job". They had played Reggie's the night before, their first time playing "Bloodbather", "Imposturing", and "Up and Away", and the first two of those got a blistering Riot Fest treatment the next day. Still, at the festival, with Devourer out for a mere week at the time, Cursive prioritized older material, which sounded just as urgent. After a plea with the crowd to vote, Kasher yelped throughout "Dorothy at Forty", Newbery's horns and Megan Siebe's cello the chaos elements. When Kasher announced how excited he was to see Mastodon and Slayer, for a moment, you could view them as three loud, rhythmically complex bedfellows.

I caught up with Kasher after Cursive's set for an interview, during which we discussed Devourer, playing live, horror films, and social media. (Halfway through the interview, fittingly, Lamb of God's set started, a sonic explosion in the background.) Tomorrow night, Cursive plays Empty Bottle; I can't think of a better place to channel post-election rage than screaming along to songs from an album whose twisted world may soon resemble our reality.

Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: Was last night the first time you played the new songs live?

Tim Kasher: Three of them, yeah. There are two songs off the record we toured around last year, but that's it.

SILY: Was the approach to adapting them to a live stage any different than for the songs from your previous records?

TK: It was an interesting week of rehearsals. It occurred to us, looking at one another, that we prepped them for the studio but didn't know how to play them live. Despite us having a lot of instrumentation and getting a little ornate, we also have six band members, so we have a cello, trumpet, and keys with us. We're actually able to pull off quite a bit of what we do on the album live. It's not verbatim, but that's also not necessary. We're not really interested in that. So over the week of rehearsals, we were making those executive decisions, of why things would work better certain ways, little things here and there. I think they translate pretty well.

SILY: Marc Jacob Hudson, who co-produced it, also does your live sound. Did that help?

TK: Yeah, I think it helped a ton. We kind of had organic pre-production. We wouldn't even call it pre-production; it was literally just us sitting on the bus talking about music, talking about the record, getting ready together to ask ourselves, "What do we want to do? What do we want to get out of this? What do we want it to sound like?" Marc was awesome. He really came across as an additional member, which is the best way to feel about a producer.

SILY: You didn't do a typical record release show, but you presented the album and its music videos in 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound. It's a cool way to present something as artistically intended in a format that not everybody has access to.

TK: I'm proud of how it all turned out, just because it was kind of ambitious. Doing the 5 genre videos was ambitious. It was a lot of extra work we didn't need to do. As recently as the last couple albums, we had kind of a negative attitude about the videos, because you put all this money and labor into it, and it just sits on YouTube, and what's the big deal? This time around, we had this initial cocktail napkin idea of doing a lot of horror genre videos. I've gotten to know a decent amount of horror directors, so I thought I would reach out to see if they were interested. The responses were awesome, so we decided to do it. We did a real 180 and embraced videos this time. Because we did 5, and made them not just promo material but their own thing, with VHS tapes, it's its own project, connected to the album, but different to the album. We did lyric videos for the rest of the songs. I'm really excited about it. Ultimately, we're going to have them all up on YouTube, and I'd encourage people to consume it in that way. If you want to put it on your TV and watch, it's not the worst idea.

SILY: The album is very cinematic, and my favorite type of horror films are, at their heart, social tales that use horror to say something else. Similarly, on this record, you use horrific imagery to talk about climate anxiety and late capitalism. Was that your intention going into it?

TK: I'm still figuring that out. [laughs] When a record comes out, it's an opportunity for me to start understanding a little bit better what the record is about. Everybody is taking it in and giving me their reactions, which informs me. I wanted this album to be more eclectic. I put some extra effort into listening to the whole catalog, and it reminded me that 20-25 years ago, our MOs was to be eclectic. We didn't want to put out a heavy album, pop album, or mellow album. The last few Cursive records--and it's not a bad thing--lean pretty heavy, which is my growth as a writer getting more excited about louder, heavier music. I want to be a part of it. When I was listening to this album, thinking what it was about, what the title should be, I kept thinking to myself, "Damn, this is still pretty aggressive, loud, and angry, so thankfully we have these eclectic, poppy, quiet songs. But this is more pissed off than I realized it was." An early album title I had for it was Bruiser because the album seems like a bully to me. It's got a bad attitude. Devourer ended up being a variation on that. It's the type of title that does fit in with the horror genre. The best analogy is humanity devouring this planet, but with the artwork, I think of it in more sci-fi and horror elements, or a suggestion of the planet turning on us.

SILY: As much as the album sounds hard and heavy, you have the horns and cello to balance it out. You might be the only band with a cello to ever play Riot Fest.

TK: I don't know. I bet not.

SILY: It took me until yesterday to see an acoustic guitar. Horns, though, there's enough ska here to go around.

TK: [laughs]

SILY: I really like the line at the end of "The Avalanche of Our Demise" where you're talking about the apocalypse having to wait because you're too swamped. I feel like the album has a lot of themes of you balancing personal crises with the world's crises. Is that something you think about pretty often?

TK: A song like that gets pretty snarky. I'm not being hard on any specific person, but on a lot of social media, there's a lot of virtue signaling. You see a lot of, "I'm really down for the cause, and I've got some time between 11 and 2 on Saturday." There's hypocrisy in all of us, me included. It's important people understand I'm wagging the finger at myself. I don't want to be like that, but sometimes, you're slammed, and you mean well, but you're coming across like a fucking asshole.

SILY: You touch on that on "Imposturing" as well.

TK: I probably shouldn't be too hard on myself...I just don't want to be virtue signaling, myself.

SILY: I love the image of a beached whale on a sidewalk curb on "What Do We Do Now", how you're worried about what the HOA will think. You do have to laugh at it all. You can have these genuine feelings of concern and empathy for causes while also recognizing that people often post on social media out of the desire to gain social capital.

TK: I wanted to go surreal with that song. I was imaging, "What if some of the world's big crises landed at your doorstep?" How would people react?

SILY: Do you foresee these songs evolving as you play them live?

TK: Absolutely. There's already songs that I think were a little bit too slow on the album.

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