Rise Up Rise Up: Cursive

After more than a decade spent magnifying his personal idiosyncrasies into full-blooded post-punk anthems, Cursive's main songwriter Tim Kasher has become a man with a message on fifth album ‘Happy Hollow’. It's an unlikely role for the self-deprecating front man sat in the King's College classroom-turned-backstage area and he explains his view on the harmfulness of religious belief with the conviction of a former Catholic, and the self-doubt of someone who’s more used to judging himself than other people.  The album itself is as indirect an attack on religion as you can get, with quirky storytelling and swinging near-pop vibrancy acting as the hefty spoonful of sugar Kasher imagines we'll need to digest his anti-establishment medicine. 

His phobia of the soapbox is understandable since Cursive’s fan base of earnest emo-kids already hang on his every word, and Kasher virtually shudders at the memory of being treated as "some kind of relationship psychiatrist" in the wake of Domestica, his 2000 "divorce record" with Cursive.  But his first-hand experience with Christianity, first as an insider, and now as an observer of its effect on American foreign policy, makes it impossible for him to withhold judgement - even if people close to him take offence.    

 "I was kind of losing sleep about it while we were recording," ventures the soft-spoken Kasher.  "I come from a catholic background, my family for the most part is catholic, I went to catholic school till I was eighteen.  And now the record's released I'm going to be running into people who would have a very aggressive reaction to it."  The lyrics include songs about a gay priest, a knocked up pseudo-virgin, and holy war, but that's not to say that Cursive have eschewed subtlety for run of the mill religion-bashing. 
 
Kasher's own catholic experience makes him all too aware of the complexities involved.  "It's really difficult to sing about religion without preaching," says Kasher.  "And that was a really touchy issue with this album: if we're upset about people preaching we don't want to preach ourselves...  And it’s really impossible.  There's a point where you have to a little bit, and in the song 'Rise up Rise up' that's it.”  Propelled by the song’s careening campfire-core, he sings, "Live a full life/'cause when it's over, it's done.”  "For that song,” he says, “that's not really a character anymore.  It's just myself speaking directly to the organisation that raised me: 'I've left and here I am I've come back and this is what I've learned'." 

 But he’s keen to stress that the album is actually much less about him than previous albums have been, and he says this was a conscious step away from 2003’s ‘Ugly Organ’.  "I recognised things that I shouldn't be singing about any more, like self-actualization, self-deprecation, self-reflexivity...  These things that I'd really hit over the head with The Ugly Organ.  It's such a small personal record in that sense,  so this time we wanted to make sure to get outside of ourselves, to get outside of our own heads, and write about other people and other things."  However, the success of the Ugly Organ made self-consciousness even more difficult to escape.  "There's this wide audience now, and I feel this responsibility," says Kasher.  "I'm definitely conscious of the fact that people will be listening, cause if I weren't conscious of that  we'd be more willing to say more heinous things about religion.  If I didn't think the songs would leave my bedroom,  then I may not have taken such a mature approach or tried to take a more enlightened approach."