"I don't tend to call bullshit on other people," Cursive front man Tim Kasher tells me, so I must call bullshit on him.
Cursive's bombastic 2003 album, The Ugly Organ, is a brutal takedown of belief systems, the fakery of lovers and shallow art. It's the kind of powerful, spirit-withering, bullshit-calling music that's so relentlessly bleak it makes tortured soul and Kasher pal Conor Oberst seem like a kitty blissfully purring on its mother's stomach.
"I've often said that I admire the way Conor writes because he can say such positive things," Kasher says. "It just hasn't been easy for me to do it."
On "Art is Hard," Kasher rails against faux-emotional musicians milking and exaggerating their own anguish. It's a message to other bands to try harder with their lyrics, but Kasher is also firing an arrow at himself when he sings: "Cut it out—your self-inflicted pain / is getting too routine / the crowds are catching on / to the self-inflicted song / Well, here we go again."
"A lot of the cynicism and sarcasm" on The Ugly Organ was, Kasher says, "a reaction to my own songwriting process. I had such a hard time writing lyrics because I kept trying to make them more fantastic, more gut-wrenching. I'd write something, and the next day I'd be like, 'This is just utter shit.' I was making shit up to be emotionally compelling. It made me sick."
It's not like Kasher hasn't had actual hardship as source material. Not yet 30, he's already lived through a failed marriage and a collapsed lung. There's plenty of bleakness in his wounded heart. But he has felt the need at times to create more. And we're culpable, because Kasher thinks that we want more anguish, that we want to bleed him bone dry, to cut him into pieces so that we can feel a little more whole. Kasher knows that he can be full of crap, but a lot of it is our own goddamn fault.
As Kasher reveals on "Butcher the Song," "I'm writing songs to entertain / But these people ... they just want pain / They just want to hear my deepest sins / the songs from the ugly organ / And what comes out is a horriblemess."
Kasher, as you can imagine, is astounded that his mess of an album has been selling well. He knew it was a record he believed in, but he also told band mates that "I don't think anybody else is going to believe in it."
Even now, he's not so sure of his band's future.
The Ugly Organ "might be the biggest thing I'll ever do," Kasher says. "I can't sit here and expect that everything's going to be easy. You can hope."
Hope is, of course, not the same thing as faith, and faith is something that Kasher isn't exactly overflowing with. He grew up Catholic but is now anti-religion, and when he compares himself to a preacher on The Ugly Organ's opening track, it sounds like the worst insult he could dream up. In the one minute and 50 seconds of "Some Red Handed Sleight of Hand," Kasher rails against the soulessness of spiritual "songs perverse and songs of lament."
And even though Kasher's band is now on the Plea for Peace tour, attempting to raise voter awareness, he says Cursive isn't a political act. They are, he insists, "a drunk apathetic band that's nonpolitical."
Kasher might not believe in much, but he certainly knows how to remain on message. Even when he talks about trying to be happy, he can't help but talk himself down.
"I'm turning 30 this summer and wanting to focus on positive things and not be so incredibly selfish, which I have a tendency to be," Kasher says, and the hole in his heart continues to grow.