I've never been to nebraska--I don't think I have anyway--but the place gives me the creeps. Not, as you may have guessed, because I have a fear of small towns or flat land or multi-grain breads, but because all the bands I know from there scare the shit out of me.
Cursive
Details
January 28. The group also performs earlier that day at Good Records.
Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios
The first to do it was Bright Eyes, a project master-minded by a young guy called Conor Oberst. I remember hearing the name when his first record came out in 1998; it got a lot of attention because he was only like 16 when he made it. But I didn't actually hear his music until the handsome artwork on the cover of Every Day and Every Night, his 1999 EP, enticed me into giving it a listen. I liked what I heard--in particular the way he dressed up what could have been the way-lame daydreams of a post-pubescent Elliott Smith fan in slide guitar and chimes--but was a little spooked by how into it he was. Here was a kid just out of high school ranting about being drunk before sunrise and dying in his lover's arms. That hysteria plagued Fevers & Mirrors, his celebrated full-length follow-up, and pretty much turned me off Oberst for the present: passion = good; forced, open-veined melodrama = iffy.
So it was with trepidation that I approached Cursive, another of Omaha's bleeding hearts and a Saddle Creek Records labelmate of Oberst's. As with Bright Eyes, I'd been aware of the band for a while--mostly via the overheated emo kids who used to leave their shit behind at the college radio station--but hadn't given them a chance until the recent Cursive's Domestica (yeah, that's the real title). Guess I was intrigued by the concept: Singer-guitarist Tim Kasher gets married, gets divorced, writes album (slim pickings, I know, but beats "gets girlfriend, gets broken up with, writes album"). Unfortunately, the band's similarly overwrought indie rock isn't even as notable as Oberst's maudlin muck. A part of me appreciates Kasher's reach and his admirable (and seemingly very sincere) attempt to bury the past with this stuff, but I can hardly get through the first thing he utters without wondering when his own heavy hand's gonna crush him: "The night has fallen down the staircase/And I, for one, have felt its bruises."Cursive: I've never been to Nebraska--I don't think I have, anyway--but the place gives me the creeps. Not, as you may have guessed, because I have a fear of small towns or flat land or multi-grain breads, but because all the bands I know from there scare the shit out of me.It's not that these kids choose to write serious songs about serious topics that makes me queasy; it's how one-dimensionally they do it. I mean, didn't word reach Omaha that darkness without light is just absence?
