May be you know that feeling, you see a band, you know close to nothing about it, everyone around you is really into it and you desperately try to go with the flow and enjoy the show as much as the rest of the crowd, but it is harder for you, as nothing sounds familiar.
On Thursday night, Cursive was doing an in-store performance at Amoeba for the release of their new album ‘I am Gemini’, a day before a sold-out show at the Troubadour. They did some stripped-down versions of their new songs, before going into their back catalogue.
They started by ‘The Cat and Mouse’, a new song whose lyrics seemed to talk about… what the title says, and right away you could hear the storytelling (it is a concept album I have heard) and Tim Kasher's expressive vocals, which, during the whole set, were like an emotional rollercoaster, going up and down, crying, screaming, getting hoarse or even really angry.
For the first songs, it was all I could concentrate on, since the instruments were rather restrained compared to Kasher’s strong pipes. They were only three on stage, Matt Maginn and Ted Stevens helping on electric guitar, synthetizer, eventual back up vocals, and a strange little electronic white box.
The new songs were easily identifiable as there were a lot of ‘Gemini’ in them; the new album, which is about the story of two twin brothers, Cassius and Pollock, and the eventual exploration of your evil twin, may have been a too big concept to understand in this short amount of time,…and how are the cat and the mouse come into play exactly? I am not sure…
Between his kind-of-strange and agitated songs, Kasher was drinking tea and talking to the audience, doing an improvised Q&A in the middle of the set, talking about preferring not wearing pants, embarking on some funny rants about very old times and a great movie with pant-less characters, ‘The Quest for Fire’. he was also asked 'how does he make songs', which was ‘a much deeper question which would necessitate him to lay out on a couch for long sessions’. We just learned he likes watching horror movies (such as ‘The Shining’) while composing, and everything comes easily to him! The pant thing was perfect to introduce an older tune, ‘Caveman’, which was a little different than the other ones, with more rhythm.
On several songs, there was the addition of a sad trumpet, a nice and too rare thing in pop music, and I even thought some songs had a slight smooth-jazz feeling. Going to older song from their previous album, ‘From the Hips’ was actually the only one truly reminding me the fingerprints of his close friend Conor Oberst,… probably Kasher’s original and flexible approach to vocals was also a connection to the Bright Eyes frontman.
They close their performance with the opening track of their new album, ‘This House Alive’, which could serve as a definition for 'emo'. Nevertheless, despite this new familiarity and Kasher’s friendly talking to the crowd, I was still an outsider after their impeccable performance. It is not totally explicable since those guys are obviously excellent musicians, and fronted by an intense singer, who can effortlessly express all the emotions of the human spectrum with his singing. May be it was the lack of hooks on some songs, the too big concept of the lyrics, I don’t know,… may be I will need more time, contrarily to all these enthusiastic fans who were standing around me