staying aliiiiiiiiiive (Cursive @ The Regent 2/12/2025)
I'm hobbling down the sidewalk, jabbering away about my youth with my granddaughter at my side. "And when I was a teenager, all of the coolest musicians lived, not in New York or London or Los Angeles, but in Omaha Nebraska."
"Sure Grandma, let's get you to bed."
Saddle Creek, babies!! Conor Oberst, a Midwest princess long before Chappell Roan...L.A. exiles Rilo Kiley dropping one sick album before going pro...The Faint making delicious dance punk (forever my favorite kind of punk)...and of course we cannot forget Cursive. Cursive were responsible for one of my all-time favorite musical memories of adolescence. More on that in a bit.
How did I find out about all of this Omaha-based goodness? It was basically a blur of burned CDs. I wish I remembered the specifics of who gave me what. I didn't know I was going to be a music blogger yet, so I didn't write it down. This was 2004 or so, I was a freshman in high school, and my home internet wasn't good enough to snatch mp3s from the Web—please don't ask me about the time I tried to redeem a bunch of iTunes codes that I got from a shitload of Pepsi bottle caps and every download failed...I'm still sore about it—so my journey toward Altness was pretty much through social contagion. Burned CDs, stored in backpacks, passed between classes. If you loved the person you burned the CD for, you maybe even printed out the real cover art on your parents' fussy color inkjet printer.
My dear friend Ruby listened to Cursive before I did, she definitely put me on to The Ugly Organ. I knew I liked emotional music, but this shit was raw as hell in a way I did not expect. The guitars were gnarly, the cello (🖤 the cello 🖤) shredded, the pace and intensity of the drums made it sound like the band was just trying to get everything out on tape before some kind of foreseen untimely doom. Every song on that album was bleeding out in real time. And so was I! I was a classic freaked out adolescent, everything was wrong, everything was moving too fast. I was writing bad poetry about how pissed off and horny I was, and so a line like We all know art is hard when we don't know who we are felt like at least a temporary flotation device.
One day I was having boy trouble, the kind of boy trouble a confessional LiveJournal post couldn't alleviate. I ate lunch in the band room—I played flute, did you know that? I was pretty damn good too—and Ruby joined me and we commiserated. Ruby had The Ugly Organ handy, and we hijacked the band room's sound system and played the CD real loud. Ruby started interpretive dancing to the song "Staying Alive," a ten minute song that closed the album. Listening to the rest of The Ugly Organ was like getting buried alive, and "Staying Alive" sounded like punching your way through all the dirt back to the surface.
Ruby flailed around the room, and I was crying and laughing at the same time. It was beautiful. She danced the full ten minutes too. There was something perfectly self-aware about it. I think we both felt exactly as young as we were in that moment—we knew this wasn't the last time we were going to deal with romantic interests being dipshits, or the last time we would feel simply too dramatic to act normal, but it was the last time that we could be so silly in a space that was kind of public but also just ours. No other dorks were going to spend their precious lunch fiddling with the band room CD player. Total catharsis in an uncool zone before an afternoon of World Civ and Honors Geometry.
And wow, I got a press invite to see Cursive play at the Regent Theater the other week! I had never seen them live before. I knew they had put out an album last year, and obviously a bunch of albums between that one and The Ugly Organ, but I decided to go in totally cold (no peeping at Setlist.fm) and see what was up.
It was an amazing show—the band sounded just as intense live as they did on their record from over 20 years ago, and Tim Kasher's stage presence was so charismatic. His banter bubbled over with boyish enthusiasm; the stage visuals involved a subtly animated version of their latest album Devourer, and Kasher marveled at the screen between songs: "If it were 1925 instead of 2025, this moving graphic behind me would be BLOWING ALL OUR MINDS!"
I honestly was going to be chill if they played mostly new stuff. A band shouldn't have to stay trapped in 2003 forever just because they made a classic orchestral emo banger of an album. And they did play new stuff—I really enjoyed the subtle melody of "Dark Star" and the meditative string-forward waltz of "The Rookie"—but they also treated their audience to four songs from The Ugly Organ including my beloved "Staying Alive." What a gift.
Music rips because you can meet the same song at different points in your life and mark how you've changed in comparison. I'm in my mid thirties and married now. So is Ruby! I hugged her at the welcome drinks the night before her wedding at an art museum in Pittsburgh and said something like, isn't it nice that we made it through the time where it felt like we were wearing our skin inside-out? But listening to "Staying Alive" up in the balcony, I also felt the same as I ever was. I still have to dance out my feelings, and I still love using musical catharsis to help me snap out of it, stop being such a baby, and keep on chugging.
In high school I'd listen to the line "Doo doo doo dooo doo doo doo doo, the worst is over," and think bullshit, the worst is happening right this second. And I don't necessarily know if the worst is ever really over. Fresh horrors lurk daily and the grim reaper is always there to cash his check. But it sounded right to me at the show.
Cursive
Thanks for reading musicpulsestudios! If you like it, tell a friend.
