Saturday, March 17   1:00 a.m.
Beauty Bar Patio   (617 E 7th St)

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  Cursive - Dorothy at Forty
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After a steady diet of near-constant touring across three continents, including a stint opening for The Cure on the 2004 Curiosa tour, Cursive was a quintet on the precipice. Their then-most recent record "The Ugly Organ" had racked up considerable accolades--named one of 2003's best records by Blender, called "the best album of (the band's) career" by The New York Times and given a 4-star rating by Rolling Stone--but the band, ragged and road-weary, opted for an ambiguous hiatus rather than forge onward to the daunting task of Follow-Up to Hit Record.

All was quiet in Camp Cursive for more than a year...and then, slowly at first, after much decompression and contemplation, they began to discuss and then assemble a new record as a freshly reconstituted four-piece--the longtime core of Tim Kasher (vocals, guitar), Matt Maginn (bass), Clint Schnase (drums) and Ted Stevens (guitar, vocals).

The band's reemergence finds them self-assured and assertive as ever. Rather than retread familiar artistic ground, Cursive has unfurled their most adventurous and accomplished work to date, "Happy Hollow." This is an expansion of Cursive's trademark discordant swell: dissonant yet distinctively melodic guitar sounds and frontman Kasher's ever-cathartic yowl now mesh and clash with horns, piano, accordion and other various instrumentation.The new songs are marked by a new bounce, a buoyant strut and a recognition that hey...this is fun.

Still informed by a wise, road-tested sense of dynamics, the songs groove, rock and dart with brash swagger, interspersed with hints of gospel and skewed blues. The rhythm section, heavier, tighter, and more propulsive than ever, drives the songs forward while horns careen over interweaving guitars and dueling vocals. Eschewing the stock-in-trade relationship lyrics of recent records for a broader scope, Happy Hollow explores and dissects such themes as shattered American dreams, small-town malaise and religious hypocrisy. Happy Hollow takes the scalpel to its small-town inhabitants and their stories, dredging up debates of intelligent design, blind devotion, homosexuality and patriotism--while calling out false virtue, righteous cant and sanctimonious liars--to create a literate, impassioned and empirical look at organized religion arranged as 14 hymns for heathens.

Never repeating themselves, always pushing forward artistically and never settling, Cursive returns to raise the bar with yet another groundbreaking new album, Another Hit Record as Follow-Up to Hit Record.