The Ugly Organ- Cursive

This is the first record of maybe two, I don't feel comfortable recommending to everyone who reads my blog. It is an incredibly brave and dynamic record. It also frequently plunges me into or keeps me hankered in depression. So be careful. It most certainly is not a happily themed record, and blanketly fails the 13th Article of Faith test. But I'm of the opinion that much of the best art, literature, and music of the world is kinda dark. Sometimes this is to demonstrate the need for morality, as in Madame Butterfly. Sometimes it's just to show us how depraved we really are. Either way, I'm not convinced such work is without value or purpose.

The Ugly Organ is both a metaphor for and a character in the drama that is this album. Frontman Tim Kasher plays guitar and organ all over the album and cellist Gretta Cohn contributed heavily to this album and left the group about a year and a half later. The Organ and Cello also play musical "roles" though it's less like lietmotif (i.e. Peter and the Wolf), and more like a continuing dialogue of differing perspectives. The album is post-modern in the best sense possible, that it's constantly calling itself into question. An accusation will be made only to be followed by a questioning of that accusation. Tim never says he is right without shortly after implying he's a fraud. It's very introspective and very intense. I will not use the word emo. The greatest crime in the history of the word 'emo' may be that it was used to describe both Cursive and Dashboard Confessional.

The album's best value is in it's songwriting. This is just plain, great songwriting. Next to that though, is the brilliant musical texturing. Thousands of talented musicians have dedicated much of their lives to the ideas of dissonance, dischordance, and random noise. (The way many talented artists have dedicated much of theirs to modern art which is less concerned with complicated strokes, than the building blocks of shape, color, and perspective themselves.) But rarely have I heard it so perfectly put to use. There's moments when you honestly wonder how long they spend bending and bashing in the pipes of that organ or how long that guitar had been out of tune or if Tim got kicked in the throat by a pack animal before he stepped to the microphone. There's a lot of musical moments that don't sound quite right. But it's because all this business about divorce, and hatred, and meaningless sex isn't quite right. This world isn't quite right. Finally, the poetic and dramatic value of the work is unnerving. Take out the booklet and read the words of the "play" and you will be floored. For a man that has gotten a lot of things pretty wrong in his life, he sure understands a lot. Whether it's a discussion of art and marketing, a scene-play between a scorned woman and her gentleman caller, or an unhinging of the Pinnochio story, the thing just has merit. It's good on too many levels to be bad. Technically, the recording is nothing spectacular. It's not shoddy either. It's PERFECT. A lot of times I've felt like I've suffered as an engineer by knowing a lot. I learn how to make things sound amazing, and forget that sometimes there not supposed to sound amazing, in fact, some things are supposed to sound downright uninteresting. I listen to some of my first recordings and am regularly surprised by how good they are, cause I didn't have any experience to get in the way. I just had to go on what sounded right. I admire the restraint of an obviously talented engineer who made this album sound exactly like it should.