Liner notes for Cursive’s The Ugly Organ reissue

I wrote a critical essay for the 2014 reissue of Cursive’s excellent album, The Ugly Organ. Here’s how the essay begins:

With The Ugly Organ, Cursive made a landmark album for itself and Saddle Creek. The darkest days of the Bush Era were settling in like a dense fog over the entire country, and the outlook was bleak. That made The Ugly Organ especially potent, its gloomy inward focus a natural reflection of the era.

The press accolades came quickly, from the mainstream (Rolling Stone called it “a brilliant leap forward,” and Entertainment Weekly said it “raised the Saddle Creek bar”) to the niche (The A.V. Club called it “a potent piece of rock art,” Alternative Press gave it a perfect score).

Just prior to The Ugly Organ, Saddle Creek had released the celebratory compilation Saddle Creek 50, which included Cursive’s gleefully self-referential “Nonsense” (“I really don’t want to write another ‘I’m a dick’ song again”), which is included on this reissue. The label’s 49th release had been another Cursive joint, the Art is Hard single, which featured the explosive six-minute B-side “Sinner’s Serenade,” also included here. Rounding it out are four songs from Cursive’s split EP with Eastern Youth, 8 Teeth to Eat You—check out the ferocious playing by cellist Gretta Cohn on “Excerpts from Various Notes Strewn Around the Bedroom of April Connolly, Feb 24, 1997”—and two songs from the single for “The Recluse.”