Rating: 4 stars (out of five)

Arriving on the heels of the definitive Domestica, The Ugly Organ finds emo rockers Cursive perched on the edge of stardom—and that doesn’t sit well with them.  Organ is an album full of lamentations not just of pain, but of pain expressed in art.  Domestica was the album to listen to after a break-up or divorce; the first half of Ugly Organ explores what it means to turn those feelings into songs, before launching back into the personal agony that propels the second half.  It all makes for an unorthodox, involving listen that we’ve come to expect from the band.

Ugly Organ opens with the prototypical throwaway first cut (the first hint the record will be more flexible than its nine-song predecessor) but starts in earnest with “Some Red-Handed Sleight of Hand” and “Art is Hard,” which barely give the listener time to catch his breath in between cathartic shouts.  Ugly Organ could use more of those songs, though, as it teeters back and forth between punk charges and calmer fare.  Midtempo “The Recluse,” following the aforementioned pair, isn’t bad, but the meaningless “Herald! Frankenstein” is.  And both “The Butcher” and “Gentleman Caller” are succeeded by songs that don’t match their intensity.

The melodies of Ugly Organ are a hair below those of Domestica, thus requiring repeated listens to get to the core of the songs, the best of which restlessly shift their dynamics musically and blend together their lyrical themes. “Butcher the Song” fluctuates expertly from quietude to fury throughout, whereas the gentle and lovely outro of “Gentleman Caller” is hardly recognizable compared to the compelling thrash of the beginning. 

Lyrically, especially on “Hand,” “Art,” and “Butcher,” what’s so compelling is the way frontman Tim Kasher blurs together the line between artistic and personal feelings.  “Try and fail and try again / The comfort of repetition / Keep churning out those hits / Till it’s all the same old shit,” he exclaims on “Hand,” whereas “Butcher” addresses a lover:  “Rub it in / In your dumb lyrics / Yeah, that’s the time and place to wring out your bullshit / And each album I get shit on a little more / Who’s Tim latest whore?”  When he cries “I can’t forget what’s been said / And this guilt I can’t shed / It still rings in my ears” he sounds wholly committed to the material, as though he’s reliving it at that very moment—the kind of intense Cursive moment that few do better.   

Kasher dominates the album more so than Domestica, which had a more consistent musical palette.  The success of the slower fare in the middle is inconsistent, while “Bloody Murderer” and “Sierra” are standard punk charges, albeit with strong choruses.  But anyone doubting their creativity will eat his words after the closing number, which, quite simply, comes out of nowhere.  Generally, when a band writes one long song for an album, it mirrors the others in sound and tone (e.g.: Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism”), but “Staying Alive” shelves Cursive’s bitterness and raucous energy in favor of an anthem as grand and majestic as anything U2 ever recorded.  The middle section, when the drums start to pound and Kasher and fellow guitarist Ted Stevens alternate between thick blasts of noise and Placebo-style shimmering licks and Gretta Cohn’s cello provides a melodic underpinning as Kasher belts “I’m stayin’ aliiiiiiiiiive,” marks a new high point for the band—even if the song, as a whole, could probably use a few minutes off the end.

“I’m writing songs to entertain / But these people, they just want pain,” Kasher sings on “Butcher.”  With Cursive, sometimes one is the other.