Cursive – Devourer | Album Review
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Run For Cover
A fucking brick tied to a hammer through the windshield at 100 miles per hour. This was the very first thing I felt hearing “Botch Job” for the first time, the blazing opener from the tenth Cursive album Devourer. It’s an apt title for the way the album kicks off, swallowing you whole in the midst of sharp, syncopated rhythms without stopping to chew or hydrate. The song is a full-force rocker that transitions into a lovely chorus section spotlighting Megan Siebe, the most badass cellist in alt-rock, churning with the rest of the band behind the dark and distinct frontman Tim Kasher. We’re only a few months shy of list season, so I feel confident calling “Botch Job” one of the year’s greatest opening tracks. The nearly three-decade surviving Nebraska band is no stranger to intensity, a facet that sold me on their music in the first place, although I’m still a bit of a stranger myself to most of their catalog.
Sometime in the early 2000s, my cousin showed me “Sierra,” the classic track from Cursive’s emo opus, The Ugly Organ. I held onto that anthem for a handful of years as my personal greatest hit of the band, a song so rad that I somehow refused any notion of listening to anything else they’d done, including the rest of The Ugly Organ. In 2009, I caught wind of their sixth album, Mama, I’m Swollen, and that album’s opening track, “In The Now,” became the second Cursive song I fell in love with. Things stayed that way for a full decade: just me, two Cursive songs, and an inexplicable lack of desire to further investigate a band who, by my account, had at least two incredible songs.
It was my girlfriend who made the final sale for me in 2019 when she took me to their co-headlining tour with mewithoutYou, supported by The Appleseed Cast. I was prepared for that show by being 1) a longtime Appleseed fan who had never seen them in concert, 2) a less than lukewarm mewithoutYou fan who became vehemently against everything that band was about after seeing them play a dreadfully boring set, and 3) a curious Cursive fan who loved exactly two songs. They must have known I was coming, like they had a secret band meeting backstage and went, “Oh shit, that kid that only knows and likes two of our songs is coming; let’s convince him we have more than two good songs” (a brief aside: I went through this exact same scenario with Dashboard Confessional as well a couple years prior). They opened with “Sierra” and did not play “In The Now,” but then played a lot of other songs that I came to enjoy very much, and I asked their merch seller for a recommendation on which vinyl I should buy since I was now a Cursive convert. He recommended the third album, 2000’s Cursive's Domestica.
I brought that record home, played it, and thought, “This rocks but sounds nothing like the live show or those two songs I’ve loved forever.” So I began to educate myself on the ever-stylistically-mutating band known as Cursive, whose first three albums exist in the classic emo canon alongside legendary bands like Elliott, Mineral, and Texas Is The Reason, before transitioning into sort of a goth-rock Yellowcard or a steam-punk Modest Mouse on The Ugly Organ. I would go on to sell that copy of Domestica, then after the pandemic, see them perform all of Domestica in concert, buy the 20th-anniversary reissue version at that concert, and then sell that copy of Domestica. This is no shade to Domestica; it’s more reflective of the fact that I buy too many records.
So this is the state I enter Devourer in, where I’ve heard at least some songs from most of their albums, have a general idea of how to describe their post-hardcore-meets-art-rock sound, and have enjoyed enough of that idea to be interested in this new album. To my surprise, the first half of the album felt like my musical picture of the band had been punched through like a $10 Million Monet. As a non-expert, it feels like something totally off the wall for Cursive, yet in their wheelhouse of pushing their own sonic boundaries. Throughout the Devourer tracklist, I hear notes of artists like At The Drive-In and Biffy Clyro, much more than I hear more traditional emo or alternative influences. The band hits a run of tracks on the first side that fall into a very particular space that I think few bands are able to get into: structured, emotional music that relies more on riffs and energy than it does twinkly guitars or moaned vocals. Cursive’s new labelmates Citizen nailed this on 2017’s fantastic As You Please, or the more space rock-leaning Thrice material showcased on their latest album Horizons / East in 2021. Cursive’s aforementioned killer opener is followed by “Up and Away,” a bit of a contrast to the ferocity of “Botch Job,” built around a more melodic verse and chorus but keeping up a noisy, off-kilter riff in between.
Cursive released four advance singles to the album, which I personally think is far too much. Spoiling 25% of an upcoming release, especially when three of those singles make up the first four songs in the tracklist, seemed like a bit of an odd choice to me. Between those songs, “Imposturing” is certainly single-worthy, landing firmly in Cursive’s classic wheelhouse of frenetic yet catchy art rock. Kasher’s delivery on the lyric “If it works to be hurt you could be a piece of shit / Leave your house and your spouse like a great escape artist” is expertly calculated and performed, with a large crop of other spitfire quotables throughout:
Ain’t that the reason you write your hangdog and forthright songs?
You make ‘em up as you go along
An even odder choice to me was the band skipping the opportunity entirely on priming “The Avalanche Of Our Demise” as one of those initial singles. Personally, I think if you’ve ever been a fan of the band in any era, this seems like it could be regarded among their greatest and long-lasting cuts. It has everything you want out of a Cursive track: the angular, anchoring guitar riff, Kasher’s signature storytelling, and a creative chorus presented with the guitars, drums, and cello working in unison to accent the tale. Kasher hits another knockout vocal performance on this song with “What’s going to stop it anyway? Rogue waves and hurricanes / Isn’t that what a checkbook’s for? Disaster relief du jour.” Any moment of Devourer’s first quarter is enough to keep you locked in for the album’s remainder, although it’s my feeling that Cursive did frontload quite a bit this time around.
Things slow down on “Rookie,” which frankly is a nice moment after the no-punches-pulled run at the top of the album, and then a bit of a surprisingly upbeat number, “Dead End Days,” follows. It almost feels like a +44 track to me with the prominent keyboards and driving rhythm, which doesn’t feel outside of Cursive’s abilities at all. Kasher gets in another cutting lyric with “Life is like a bowl of grapes, stomped on until bitter wine is made.” He has always been extremely good at making lyrics stand out, and the writing on Devourer is no different.
Those synth flairs show up again on “Dark Star,” a danceable darkwave cut reminiscent of Matt Skiba’s post-punk passion project Heavens, a band I think of on “Consumers” as well with the distorted background vocals boosting Kasher’s leads. It’s in Devourer’s back half where things seem to pale compared to its strong beginning, but isolating those tracks, including the classic-Cursive-sounding “What Do We Do Now,” prove that the record isn’t as top-heavy as it feels. It just happens to have an extremely strong opening sequence that’s ripe for repetition.
“The Loss” is a quiet closer; not bad, but nothing on the level that the rest of the album is operating. Thematically, I understand its place, but the intensity of “The Age of Impotence” would have made a nice compliment to “Botch Job” if it ended the record instead. Even if Kasher’s screaming of “motherfucker!” in the refrain comes off a bit cheesy, but at least it’s much more succinct than “What the Fuck” which closes out the album’s first half on a very weak note.
Despite their stylistic evolution, Cursive feels like a very consistent group even this long into their career. These new songs from Devourer were very well received at the band’s recent Riot Fest performance, shuffled in with other catalog classics. Whether it’s Central American emo or apocalyptic art punk, Cursive can take on any sound without jeopardizing the message at the core of the band, and Devourer is the next great installment.
Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.
