Hey you. Yeah, you, holding a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius with an Adaptation ticket stub for a bookmark. You're obviously hip to the new sensation sweeping the nation: meta-fiction! Maurice the Meta-fiction Moose defines the genre as "post-modern art conscious of and reveling in its own limitations" and it's in full bloom everywhere from the bookstore to the Cineplex, with TV-show characters talking to the camera in-between. Hell, even record reviews do it-- I crafted a densely mirrored concept review around this latest release from Cursive, but it turned out to be too pretentious for prime-time (watch for it in my forthcoming collection of short stories about famous Omahaians).
One media form yet to be infiltrated by the gimmick of self-reference, however, is music, partly because it's more than a little difficult to do in a three-minute pop song, and partly because Jon Spencer ruined it for everybody. But Cursive frontman Kasher is willing to give it the old college try on The Ugly Organ, and somehow manages to do it with a minimum of pretension while simultaneously livening up the crusted emo messenger bag.
Cursive is no stranger to the concept album; their last full-length, Domestica, was a song-cycle dealing with the critical entropy of a dying marriage, and its warm reception seems to have motivated Kasher to stay in the storyteller role. The "plot" of The Ugly Organ, such as it is, revolves around loose themes of fallout remorse and hollow sexual meandering, the latter summed up in the double meaning of the album title. Appropriately, then, recurring organ figures occasionally torment Kasher's protagonist mid-song, while recent Cursive recruit Gretta Cohn's cello grants everything the epic quality it so desperately calls for.
The material fueled by this concept is pretty easy to spot, bearing woe-packed titles like "The Recluse", "Driftwood", or "Bloody Murderer", and aside from the occasional Diaryland line ("My ego's like my stomach/ It keeps shitting what I feed it"), it's a solid record for those without severe emo allergies. "The Recluse" is melancholy and full of ornate note flurries like early Joan of Arc, and the eerie "Driftwood" creeps along like "Owner of a Lonely Heart" beneath Cohn's bowed swooshes.
An entire LP of this slumped-shoulder soul-searching would get pretty tired, however; a fact that even Kasher seemed to realize as he browsed back over the sad-sack lyrics he'd penned. Enter the meta: a handful of songs wherein Kasher either ups the self-loathing ante by both expressing his sadness and further expressing his sadness about his sadness, or brilliantly anticipates the kneejerk reactions of the emo-phobic critical community (not here, of course, no, never!).
Opening the album with the couplet, "And now we proudly present/ Songs perverse and songs of lament," Kasher makes a habit of anticipating the snide commentary of his hatas and beating them to the punch. "Art Is Hard" assails his own band with the biting stab "cut it out/ Your self inflicted pain/ Is getting too routine/ The crowds are catching on/ To the self-inflicted song," and he styles "Butcher the Song" ambiguously enough to make vain critics betcha think he's talking about them, don't we, don't we: "I'm writing songs to entertain/ But these people, they just want pain."
Wisely, Kasher also attaches these masochistic episodes to the strongest songs of the album: "Red Handed Slight of Hand" being all raw anthem like Desaparecidos without the limited understanding of the geopolitical landscape, and "Art Is Hard" using Cohn to her fullest as the rest of the band emulates her fierce bowing while she rips out a buzzsaw melody like a Dick Dale cello composition. Even "Butcher the Song" which turns on a sour riff repeated ad nauseam, has a sort of, well, nauseating effect that emphasizes the self-sickened words.
With the strength of the meta-emo material, plus "The Recluse" and "Driftwood", occupying the first half of the album, it's easy to get caught up in The Ugly Organ's bold aims. Unfortunately, the album is too top-heavy to be seaworthy, the back end full of Fugazi knockoffs and half a song stretched out to ten minutes in a forced attempt at a showstopping finale ("Staying Alive"-- they'd be better off with a Bee Gees cover). The fact that Kasher, in a toe-dipping test of this meta stuff, already called himself out as a Mackaye acolyte on Cursive's last EP can't save the likes of "Sierra" and "Gentleman Caller" from my seen-it-all scorn. Bah.
Still, a solid side A is enough to make The Ugly Organ an emo album (gasp!) on Saddle Creek (yipes!) that I'm not ashamed to admit a conditional liking for. Should Kasher decide to continue along the concept album path, it would perhaps do him good to study himself some Pedro the Lion-- and he might want to steer clear of the meta from here on out-- I hear from New York that unironic is the new ironic. But for twenty minutes of The Ugly Organ, what he's got now is enough to make an idea that sounds, on paper, a million ways wrong and a shoo-in for Most Self-Indulgent Album of the Year work reasonably well. Here's hoping he draws someone less homely than Nicholas Cage for the film version.
