My favorite album of all time is Arcade Fire's Funeral. No. 2 on that list is Cursive's The Ugly Organ, a 2003 emo/pesudo-hardcorey/indie rock concept album about empty sex and emotional abuse that seemed a lot more profound to me when I bought the record as a 17-year-old than it does now.
But I still absolutely adore that album, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me to this day. But I will tell you why I love tracks seven ("Driftwood: A Fairy Tale") and eight ("A Gentleman Caller"), which constitute the Ruth and Gehrig of this record.
"Driftwood" is, pretty much, the story of Pinocchio set to a musical score that makes you confused about whether the tingling you get is an itch to dance or just your skin crawling.
The continuing rhythmic theme in this song comes in with the strings immediately. That [1+2...+4...] beat goes from cello to guitar to bass to drum set and then carries on in some combination of those instruments throughout the song.
And that's creepy as shit.
Because that rhythmic pattern is what you'd expect to find in a song by, like, Black Kids or Of Montreal, you know, a synthy, danceable beat that you serve some weird semi-erotic lyrics and a bitchin' bass guitar line the way you'd serve a good steak with mixed greens, a baked potato and a glass of red wine. But in "Driftwood," that beat is continuously moving through the dynamic layers like a dolphin jumping out of the water, and it's weaving in and out of some sneakily dark layered vocals and an absolutely menacing cello. It makes you want to dance, but not really sure how to. Not unlike the motions of a marionette.
Lyrically, it's a pretty straightforward song that gets a little heavy-handed at times, even if the recurring chorus of "My arms, my legs, my heart, my face..." bounces over the aforementioned theme quite nicely and conveys the sense of astonished self-awareness you'd expect from a newly-animated toy.
But the real payoff comes in one of my favorite crescendos in modern rock, a four-measure buildup to screaming desperation (around 2:26 in the video, though you'll have to click through to YouTube) that contains two of my favorite musical devices: the running, progressively-louder eighth-note drum hits, then the stinger and the beat of silence, after which the song reaches its full climax, when the astonishment turns to distress--"Now I wonder how I was made! Now I wonder how I was made!" and so on.
Then the song ends and you get about a minute's worth of background white noise.
Then the start of "A Gentleman Caller."
I'm not, like, immensely interested in the first half of this song, except that you probably ought to be aware that it's coming, because the minute-long mumbled interlude after "Driftwood" might put you to sleep. Then you get tossed directly into, well, a song that's pretty onomatopoetic.
The first minute and a half or so of "A Gentleman Caller" sound like a musical interpretation of the lyrics, a cheating drunkard of a man coming home and getting into a shouting match with his girlfriend. You can almost hear the broken lamp and the point where they stop caring about waking the baby.
"Driftwood" is in a fairly subdued, brisk walking pace 4/4, while "A Gentleman Caller" starts out noisy and between the wild fluctuations in volume and instrumentation, starts to make you a little seasick. It's violent, it's angry, it's absolutely irrational.
Then it turns into something completely different.
Around a minute and a half in, everything drops out except the guitar, then the cello, and instead of the sweeping, noisy, menacing violence of the first 85 seconds of the song, we get quiet, even eighth notes, then the cello, which, for the past song and a half, had been in your closet, waiting for you to fall asleep so it could jump out and eat you, switches to series of warm, swelling, legato countermelodies. And one by one, all the other instruments come in in one majestic, hopeful swell, like the end of RENT except without being abjectly terrible.
I fell in love with this record when I was about 16 years old, and over the past decade (the album turned 10 years old last month), it's stuck with me because it is a dark, cynical and for lack of a better word ugly story. It's about shallow, angry, selfish people who yell at people who don't deserve it and wake up in strange places having fucked people they don't like very much. It takes a dim view of humanity, not because it's a profound, transcendent statement, but because it's cynical. And in this case, I mean cynical in the manner suggested by the author Joe Klein, who wrote "Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre."
I wouldn't accuse Cursive frontman Tim Kasher of being particularly intelligent or insightful. Cursive has never done anything approaching the quality of The Ugly Organ before or since, and in every interview setting I've seen him in, he comes off as thinking he's a lot more clever than he actually is. Listen to The Ugly Organ and you'll think less of people. Listen to Domestica or Happy Hollow and you'll think less of the people who wrote The Ugly Organ. This record makes me feel bad when I listen to it. It's pessimistic and angry and if I had it on vinyl I'd have worn straight through it because I am a pessimistic, arrogant, angry, selfish person who doesn't think very highly of other people in general.
But 90 seconds into "A Gentleman Caller," it's different. For the first time, you get genuine tenderness. Optimism. The cello turns from menacing (which is not an exaggeration--you feel like that thing is out to get you for the first seven tracks and change) to hopeful. After seven songs of pettiness, insults, violence and sexual manipulation, you get an apology. And as the crescendo reaches its climax, you get the line that becomes a refrain that carries over to the ten-minute finale of the album, "Staying Alive." It's aggressively simple and feverishly optimistic. It's the line a child would write, because it's direct and offers an almost naively hopeful outlook. I've been murmuring this little bit to myself for ten years, and sometimes it's true, and sometimes I think it's because you can't be truly pessimistic and truly spiteful and truly angry without anything to compare it to.
But whatever the reason, after seven and a half songs of darkness and manipulation and fucking and screaming and throwing lamps, you get this:
"Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, the worst is over."
