About Cursive
Cursive is an American indie rock band from Omaha, Nebraska. Stylistically described as emo and post-hardcore, Cursive came to prominence with 2000's Domestica and found commercial and critical success with 2003's The Ugly Organ. The band has released eight studio albums, a compilations album, and a mix of singles and EPs since 1997. They have released recordings on several labels, including 15 Passenger Records, Saddle Creek Records, and Big Scary Monsters .
Cursive's influences include such bands as Fugazi, Shudder to Think, Superchunk, Archers of Loaf and Brainiac.
Cursive formed in the spring of 1995, shortly after Slowdown Virginia broke up. Slowdown Virginia members Tim Kasher , Matt Maginn , and Steve Pedersen had parted ways, along with their drummer, a month prior. The three members decided that they were not ready to give up making music, and wanted to give music a serious try, with Kasher saying, " decided with Cursive we would write the best we could, believe in it, and if everyone ended up hating it – well, we would deal with it." Clint Schnase, who played with Pedersen in a band called Smashmouth, joined as the drummer. Kasher has said that the band's name was inspired by a passage in a book by V. S. Naipaul, in which the British were forcing subjugated Indians to learn how to write English in cursive penmanship, symbolic of a pointless exercise with no value, and Kasher compares this to the band forcing music as a discipline, taking it seriously.
With an initial sound characterized by one reviewer as similar to At the Drive-In, in 1996 Cursive recorded and released The Disruption EP on Lumberjack Records, followed in 1997 by the Sucker and Dry EP on Zero Hour Records and their debut album, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, on Crank! Records. A follow-up EP, The Icebreaker, was released in early 1998. The Katz brothers of Sputnik Music summarize Such Blinding Stars and Cursive's sound at the time as "11 distortion soaked, emotion ridden songs, comes off as a younger, worse, version of the band's breakthrough Domestica" while AllMusic's Peter D'Angelo said the album "lays down the framework for the Cursive method: delicate guitars that erupt into frenzied explosions, a rhythm section that consistently keeps each track barreling forward, and the harrowing vocal contributions of Tim Kasher."
In late spring of 1998, after a couple years of touring, Cursive announced that they were breaking up. The primary cause was Kasher's marriage and move with his wife to Portland, Oregon, though guitarist Pedersen was planning on also leaving the band and Omaha to attend law school in North Carolina. Cursive recorded The Storms of Early Summer: Semantics of Song as a swan song in the spring of '98 before disbanding, and released the album post-breakup in the fall of that year on Saddle Creek Records. The Storms of Early Summer was Kasher and Cursive's first foray into writing and recording a concept album, with the first half of the album being themed "Man vs. Nature" and the second half "Man vs. Self". The album was noted for its intricate guitar work, deeply thoughtful lyrics, and the beginnings of a math-rock/pop song structure, all of which would develop more on further Cursive albums.
A little over a year later, in the summer of 1999, the band re-formed when Kasher got divorced and returned to Omaha. With Pedersen gone to law school, Ted Stevens joined the band on guitar and vocals. Within a year Cursive recorded and released their third full-length album, Domestica, in 2000. A concept album about the dissolution of a marriage, Domestica gained Cursive critical success for the first time. While not a straightforward autobiographical account of his marriage, Kasher has acknowledged that it heavily influenced the album, though some of the relationship dynamics – such as infidelity – were not autobiographical. Reviewing Domestica, Pitchfork's Taylor Clark gave the album an 8.0/10.0, calling Tim Kasher's style as "the perfect inflection and expression from the far-from-perfect vocal chords, the brains evident behind the guitar brawn" and that the band's sound had evolved since The Storms of Early Summer, saying that Cursive "retained their razor edge, creating pulsing, rapidly evolving guitar-based music, yet they're now fueled and guided by the meaning behind the music".
Cursive added Gretta Cohn as a cellist in 2001, as Kasher felt the addition would help the band evolve its sound. They recorded and released 2001's Burst and Bloom EP on Saddle Creek Records, and split an album with Japanese band Eastern Youth in 2002 called 8 Teeth to Eat You on Better Looking Records. Burst and Bloom's lead-off track, "Sink to the Beat", is a lyrically meta-concept song about the process of recording the EP itself and the effect it has on the music and the listener. Cursive toured extensively throughout 2001 and 2002, to the point of exhaustion and Kasher suffering a collapsed lung. The band had to cancel the rest of the tour and returned to writing new material.
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