20th anniversary review: Cursive – “The Ugly Organ”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Saddle Creek Records – 4 March 2003

Songs perverse and songs of lament, A couple hymns of confession, And songs that recognize our sick obsessions

There is no single album ever released that I will ever love as much as The Ugly Organ.  That’s not hyperbole, I love this album so much that it inspired the name of our youngest daugher (Sierra).  Cursive (or anything frontman Tim Kasher releases, for that matter) has a long history of brilliance, but this record in particular is impeccable.  The dissonance, the heart-wrench, the fury and the poetry come together to create a three-act narrative that will likely never be matched.  Plus, I mean, c’mon, theres a fucking cello tearing shit up.

Twenty years later, The Ugly Organ is still one of the benchmarks of the Omaha sound that dominated the early 00s, but it is not tethered to that era.  The record is truly timeless. If you’d never heard it there’s nothing that ties it to a 2003 sound. Could’ve been ‘93 or 2023 and it wouldn’t matter because the record is innovative and works across all demographics. The record is tied to the listener not to the timeline or genre.

Musically, it is dissonant and beautiful as Greta Cohn’s sublime strings strike and bound with precision and violence across a battlefield of angular guitars and percussive savagery.  Producer Mike Mogis serves perhaps as the “salt” of the album, an unheralded spice without which the album would be bland and flat. Mogis’ production layers in elements beyond the music itself, with conversations under the soundtrack, little pieces of script from the characters in Kasher’s tragic theatrics.

For every young man and woman with affinities for meta-art this record checks every box. Self-loathing, self-deprecation and uncomfortable self-awareness, its all there. While the band’s 2000 masterpiece Domestica seemed in many ways to mirror frontman Tim Kasher’s divorce, The Ugly Organ served as a chronicle of how 2 years on the road reliving his trauma for an audience affected him and his mental recovery. The fact that they managed to do it so flawlessly speaks volumes to the genius of Cursive, its members and their featured colleagues.

Kasher solidified himself as one of the best to ever write songs about writing songs on this record.  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such an honest reaction to one’s own genius as you hear across The Ugly Organ.  Writing an album of loss and heartbreak like Domestica, now leaves Kasher in a cell of his own making, having to consistently rehash his pain, not only on the road night after night, but also in writing the follow-up.  Kasher followed up an epic record of hatred for a love lost with an even better album of hatred, this time directed at the mistakes he made to lose the aforementioned love.  I’m sure it had been done before but never better.

Calling out his own histrionics on songs like “Art is Hard” to “Butcher the Song” Kasher has to face the way his lyrics affect those in his life, from the audiences clamoring for more heart-wrenching vocals about love gone wrong and beer gone right, his bandmates constantly having to face the questions about what was going through his mind in this track and even the exes who will forever be blamed for the imagined misdeeds projected upon them by those who hear the albums. All the while he has to face is own version of romantic recovery, the rebounds and fear of solitude encapsulated in “The Recluse” and the longing for the things he lost in the breakup, most notably “Sierra.” When a chorus of Omaha’s finest friends jumps chimes in during “Staying Alive,” it seems our narrator has finally begun to face the days ahead and spend less time existing in the days passed.

Its become commonplace for songwriters to aim at their own misdeeds rather than put the blame on the other party, and that shift in lyricism owes a great deal to Kasher and company. The influence of the Omaha outfit is spread across music as a whole, and not just in the obvious punk/post-hardcore world.  Sure, from 2002-2006, nearly every band on the Warped Tour, Bamboozle path would tell you they were influenced by Cursive and it would be easy to hear, but the band’s influence existed well outside of the sphere they were so often attached to.  The self-awareness of The Ugly Organ paved the way for Taylor Swift to be so open to saying “I’m the problem, it’s me,” the theatrics of the record opened the doors to early Panic at the Disco!’s vaudevillian take on punk. The Ugly Organ still stands as the benchmark by which all Cursive, hell all Tim Kasher albums will be compared to.  20 years into its life and the album has graced more tattoos than poor reviews, a testament to the fervor upon which those in the audience still scream out “Oh Cursive is so cool.”