Description
Six years since their last record, Cursive are back with their eighth album Vitriola, out 5th October via Big Scary Monsters.
Over the past two decades, the band have become known for writing smart, tightly woven concept albums where frontman Tim Kasher turns his unflinching gaze on specific, oftentimes challenging themes, and examines them with an incisively brutal honesty. 2000s Domestica dealt with divorce; 2003s The Ugly Organ tackled art, sex, and relationships; 2006s Happy Hollow skewered organized religion; 2009s Mama, Im Swollen grappled with the human condition and social morality; and 2012s I Am Gemini explored the battle between good and evil. But the bands remarkable eighth full-length, Vitriola, required a different approach one less rigidly themed and more reactionary as the band struggles with existentialism veering towards nihilism and despair; the ways in which society, much like a writer, creates and destroys; and an oncoming dystopia that feels eerily near at hand.
For the first time since Happy Hollow, the album reunites Tim Kasher, guitarist/singer Ted Stevens and bassist Matt Maginn with founding drummer Clint Schnase, as well as coproducer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, M. Ward, Jenny Lewis) at ARC Studios in Omaha. Theyre joined by Patrick Newbery on keys (whos been a full-time member for years) and touring mainstay Megan Siebe on cello. Schnase and Maginn are in rare form, picking up right where they left off with a rhythmic lockstep of viscera-vibrating bass and toms, providing a foundation for Kasher and Stevens intertwining guitars and Newbery and Siebes cinematic flourishes. The album runs the sonic gamut between rich, resonant melodicism, Hitchcockian anxiety, and explosive catharsis and no Cursive album would be complete without scream-along melodies and lyrics that, upon reflection, make for unlikely anthems.
Previous Praise for Mama, Im Swollen and Gemini:
a dizzying range of amped-up hardcore (In The Now), horn-powered country rock (I Couldnt Love You) and angular balladry (Let Me Up). Cursive havent sounded this crazed and inspired since their breakthrough album, 2003s The Ugly Organ. Rolling Stone
Cursive rocking out at its best. Lyrically, frontman Tim Kasher never misses a step (see the men-as-animals From The Hips and Donkeys), proving once again why hes among indie rocks greats. Billboard
forceful, a demanding rock-driven opus The A.V. Club
Cursives noisiest, most sonically inventive release in years. Alternative Press
Consider this their peak. Consequence Of Sound a conceptual, innovative and challenging album American Songwriter
Its heady, its heavy, and its classic Cursive, now in twin territory. Under The Radar
On I Am Gemini, the bands clang and clatter, guitar driven music is emblematic of all that is right with indie rock and post-punk Outburn
a conceptual, innovative and challenging album American Songwriter
Its heady, its heavy, and its classic Cursive, now in twin territory. Under The Radar
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