Cursive's The Ugly Organ is a lot more straightforward post-hardcore than Murder By Death's country-western-influenced Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them? but it shares the latter's density of heightened moments.
I didn't retain much from high school English class, but one thing that stuck out was a lecture on William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and how one would use extraordinary language to describe ordinary things and the other would use ordinary language to describe extraordinary things.
That stuck with me not only as my own writing veered toward hysterical realism, but when consuming other people's writing as well. Heading into the 2012-13 Oscar season, I was firmly a Silver Linings Playbook guy. Lots of that was probably because of all the reasons I was preconditioned to love the movie: It starred Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper. It was about unhealthy Eagles fandom and learning to live yourself and others while learning to cope with mental illness, at a time where I was going through something similar in type, if not quite in degree (i.e. I never hit anyone, was institutionalized, or learned to dance). It was set completely and necessarily just across the river from where I grew up, which is even a step beyond my desire for modern literary fiction to recognize that the U.S. has distinct places other than New York, Texas, Los Angeles and a muddied, nondescript middle, which you wouldn't know by watching TV, reading books or going to the movies nowadays. And the setting was so familiar because the movie was based by a novel written by a dude who lived the next town over from me. So suffice it to say I was preconditioned to like Silver Linings Playbook.
But beyond that, much as I liked Lincoln and Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, and while all three were more ambitious filmmaking projects, it's easy to get emotional stakes when you're abolishing slavery or killing Bin Laden. It's less easy to do that when your story is about some schmuck from Delaware County.
That's why The Ugly Organ still, to this day, after I've grown out of all the teenaged angst that attracted me to the record 12 years ago (and replaced it with different, more adult angst), is an emotional kidney punch. "Some Red-Handed Sleight of Hand" starts the record off by destroying everything in the room, all tossing chairs and bursting through doors, and descends to the melancholy of "Driftwood (A Fairy Tale)" and back up to the peak of rage in "A Gentleman Caller," a two-song inflection point that captures how emotional outbursts happen--the slow realization that you're trapped somehow, the explosion when you realize there's nothing you can do about it (featuring one of my favorite-ever crescendos), and the refocusing after you're done with your tantrum, trying to figure out a constructive way to fix the problem. And in between each step, there's a pause, because if there's one thing that art gets wrong about anger, it's the assumption that anger is constant--it's not, eventually you're just so tired from yelling and throwing things and being fueled by adrenaline that you need to take a moment to calm down and catch your breath, which "Driftwood" and "A Gentleman Caller" capture.
The back half of "A Gentleman Caller" ends on this line: "Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, the worst is over."
Which, of course, it's not. The next song, "Harold Weathervein," loses its cool immediately, and by the time "Sierra" comes around, there's nothing but worry and regret over the choices that led you through the first 11 tracks of the album, and it staggers into silence rather than offering any solution.
Which finally gets us to the finale, "Staying Alive," which, at 10 minutes, 4 seconds, makes up a quarter of the album by length.
And it's a complete departure in tone. It's quiet and resigned and serene and oddly beautiful. After being tossed around by 11 previous songs over half an hour, it's unsettling to just float along for 2 minutes and 52 seconds, at which point you realize that the song is loud and unhappy again, and it didn't get there all of a sudden--what came before was a slow, steady crescendo, like the story about boiling a frog. And you stay there for two minutes, until that refrain comes back: "Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, the worst is over."
After 12 years I'm still not completely sure what to think of that line. Is it mocking the optimism of "A Gentleman Caller" or is it sincere? If it's sincere, is the worst over because the narrator lived happily ever after, or is the worst over because there's no pain or feeling of any kind in death, or is he just resigned to having completely fucked himself up and has made the decision not to try to fix it? I've fallen asleep to this song, I've cried to this song, I've played this song at parties, and I've just sat alone listening to it in aesthetic arrest.
For a song that's one long crescendo and one longer decrescendo, with a reprise of a notable line from earlier in the record, "Staying Alive" is not an easy song to listen to. Nothing on this record is easy, particularly the emotional places it inspires you to go.
