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Sep 12, 2024 Issue #73 - Maya Hawke and Nilüfer Yanya By Frank Valish

For 30 years, Cursive, led by frontman Tim Kasher, have been at the forefront of adventurous, forward-thinking post-whatever indie rock music. Albums like 2000’s Domestica and 2003’s The Ugly Organ cemented the band’s legacy, and if their early aughts albums were all they created, that would have been enough. But the band never stopped, releasing its last two albums on its own label, both excellent works that strongly represented Cursive and Kasher’s musical vision.

The band’s latest album, Devourer, finds Cursive back on an outside label, Run for Cover, and the album is a true tour de force. “Botch Job” is all propulsive instrumental throb. “Up and Away” juxtaposes a sweet melody with jarring dissonance. “The Avalanche of Our Demise” features thumping bassline, rhythmic intensity, and an instrumental lushness that includes strings percolating throughout and rising to the surface mid-song. And that’s just the album’s first three songs. Add 10 more, including the symphonic instrumentation, impassioned vocal intensity, and maniacal instrumental march of “What the Fuck” and the indie pop jauntiness of “Dead End Days,” and Devourer is easily one of the most interesting and engaging albums of Cursive’s career.

Add to this a literate lyrical bent that takes on topics of aging, loss of hope, societal collapse, commercialization, and overall disillusionment, and the album is both exceedingly personal and eminently topical. As an aside, never has the lyric, “There’s gonna be a bloodbath” (from “Bloodbather”) been rendered so danceably infectious.

Kasher ends Devourer with the horn-filled “The Loss,” exulting that “our nightmare is over.” And before a whirlwind instrumental hurricane ends the song and the album for good, Kasher sings: “Life is but a loss / Death is all it costs / What a brutal, devastating price.” (www.cursivearmy.com)

Author rating: 8.5/10