Cursive
Mama, I’m Swollen
(Saddle Creek, 2009)

Weird joke: The first (and second and third and…) lyric on the new Cursive album is “Don’t wanna live in the now / Don’t wanna know what I know.” This is as proud a regression as any from indie’s proudest picaresque. Sorry, Colin Meloy: Tim Kasher has scripted a record five concept albums this decade. He treaded lightly with 2000’s Cursive’s Domestica, both lyrically (about his divorce, not too far removed from his indistinguishable emo beginnings) and musically (32 minutes, don’t lay it on too thick). Casting himself as “the Martyr” and his estranged wife as I don’t want to read what (oops, too late: “Well, get on that cross / That’s all you’re good for”), a few more records of this milieu and Kasher could’ve won himself any normal Thursday fan. But his dramas became subtler and less interesting after an early peak with the tensely wound, cello-abetted The Ugly Organ, one of the alternative era’s greatest records (really). The even more story-like Happy Hollow and 2007’s screenplay-cum-record Help Wanted Nights by Kasher’s quieter band, the Good Life, sank politely from view. Ironically, this was just as literary indie-rock broke through, so to speak, with the Hold Steady plotting a tour with Dave Matthews, the Decemberists doing high-profile Obama fundraisers, and the Mountain Goats earning a feature story in New York Magazine. But Cursive don’t wanna live in the now.

Mama, I’m Swollen is the dumbest record Kasher’s made since the late ’90s, and even then he saddled himself with titles like Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes.Good for him, too; where Happy Hollow suffered from chaos en masse, with horns and biblical allusions and small-town malaise tying it together like his own personal True Stories or something, here he’s not actually swollen at all. It starts with “In the Now”, a two-and-a-half-minute punk song in the tradition of “New Day Rising” before a defiantly normal four-song streak where he declares himself to be first a donkey and then a caveman, with a break for some piano heartbreak in the middle. And, in a way, Cursive’s never really tried before. It’s all so simple, with pick hit “From the Hips” convincingly anthemic, though they’ll never stop being self-referential: “We were at our best as animals” is refreshing to hear as they strap on the guitar.

This new streamlined bar band version of Cursive isn’t exactly a replacement for the old one, as they’re still a bit sludgy, with hook machine Greta Cohn no longer on cello. But they are effective; a little organ here, music box there, a lot of goofy metaphors (“You can’t take a little nibble / You gotta lick the bowl”), Kasher’s second Pinocchio-inspired song (“Donkeys”), and after a kind of bum second half, a wonderful, typically bombastic closer with “What Have I Done?” that gets extra credit for folding in 2006’s misbegotten horns tastefully. If Cursive never again make another sparks-on-rails flyby like The Ugly Organ, please let them make raggedly tuneful follow-ups like Mama, I’m Swollen ’til they collect Social Security.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

Tags: Cursive, Mama I’m Swollen, Saddle Creek, Tim Kasher

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