The Ugly Organ Is the Brain
The Ugly Organ is the most self-loathing album I have ever heard in my life, and I love it.
The album starts with a slide of organ keys into a carnival melody that sounds like riding a merry-go-round on the second circle of hell—“The Ugly Organist”—complete with faint screaming that builds to a shrill fever pitch before being abruptly cut off by four angry cracks of a snare drum into a burst of discordant guitars asphyxiated by an oppressive cello being bowed at breakneck speed. Within the barely two-minute runtime of “Some Red Handed Sleight of Hand,” Tim Kasher sings—atop frantic cello, organ fire, and violent drums—over 150 words comparing himself to a hypocritical reverend who “spews his sweet and salty sermon on the audience” whilst not following a single word of his own advice; Kasher then asks himself: “Why do I think I’m any different? I’ve been making money on my indifference.”
“Sing along, I'm on the ugly organ again. Sing along, I'm on the ugly organ, so let's begin.”
This is the crux of the record: a vicious attack on the self. The Ugly Organ is a record that hates itself—and I mean, really hates itself—led by a frontman who despises everything that he’s doing and more, which is namely selling his own heartache via records and show tickets, drawing inspiration from his own recent bitter divorce#1 and sometimes just manufacturing his own misfortune, all to keep the fans screaming his band's name at shows, which makes him feel sick. And even though he hates himself for it, he keeps doing it anyway. The Ugly Organ is an exploration of the concept of selling out, told from the perspective of a self-aware sellout who wants to stop selling out but just can’t help himself. The Ugly Organ is an album about creating art not for yourself, but for others—for fame, fortune, and validation. This is a concept album through and through, written as a tragedy to be performed on a stage, with each sorry track transitioning into the next like one scene to another. But it’s not just a concept album—it's a message that any artist can relate to. It feels autobiographical. It feels deeply personal. It feels real.
“A couple hymns of confession, and songs that recognize our sick obsessions.”
“Some Red Handed Sleight of Hand” flows into “Art is Hard,” and this is where the gloves come off and all is laid bare. “Art is Hard” fully utilizes Gretta Cohn’s mastery of the cello to create a bleak baroque tragedy, like looking into a circus mirror and seeing only a twisted monster staring back—a twisted monster that claims they’re an artist but is actually a total fraud playing pretend. Kasher yells scathing rebukes in the third person, but he's not kidding anyone; he proclaims that he “falls in love to fail, to boost his CD sales” and that “the crowds may be catching on to the self-inflicted songs” and that he has to “sink to swim” and that he has to keep “regurgitating sorry tales about a boy who sells his love affairs” and that he has to “impersonate greater persons” because “we all know art is hard when we don’t know who we are,” because, at the end of the day, when you get on the stage and the crowd screams your name—“Oh, Cursive is so cool!”—it all just feels so good, and you are driven to repeat yourself over and over. This is all laced with thick irony, and wrapped in both post-punk and hardcore sensibilities with staccato cello edge and jarring, banshee-like guitar tones, amounting to a full-on attack of the senses, equal parts aural and psychic as hell. And this bitter questioning of self—this sordid tale of self-loathing and selling out—is one of the most popular songs on the record, the type of song that inspires real people in real crowds to shout “Cursive is so cool!” during the “Cursive is so cool!” part, without realizing the irony made manifest by doing the very thing that the lyrics are so contemptuous of.
“Keep churning out those hits, 'til it's all the same old shit.”
Cursive came to prominence in the early 2000s alongside groups like The Faint and the now-legendary Bright Eyes, the latter of which led by Conor Oberst, all of which were on the same label, Saddle Creek, founded by Justin Oberst—Conor’s brother—which formed a small collective of talented musicians from Omaha, Nebraska. Bright Eyes, with their soft acoustics, dubious saccharinity, and Conor’s uniquely poetic lyricism reminiscent of a drug-addled schoolboy with well-off parents who is also incurably white and very much wants to be Bob Dylan, landed Saddle Creek smack dab in Midwest Suburban Whiteboy Emo Music of Middling Quality territory, which wasn’t far from the truth at first. But after about three minutes into The Ugly Organ, anyone familiar with Cursive's previous three albums could tell something very weird was going on; we weren't in Nebraska anymore: this wasn’t the High School True Love Break Up music people had come to expect from Saddle Creek; this was Hate Myself for Singing High School True Love Break Up Music music accompanied by a crazy talented orchestra of ego-shredding strings and hellfire organs.
“Cut it out, your self-inflicted pain, is getting too routine.”
With the fourth track on the album—”The Recluse”—Tim Kasher goes right back to his old tricks, singing of the same sordid love affairs that he criticized just moments ago. “The Recluse” is a softer composition more reminiscent of what Saddle Creek listeners have come to expect, only with a jarring sparseness like that of The Cure’s “Lullaby,” with a picked guitar lead that lulls you into an intricate web and long-drawn cello notes like the theme song of the black recluse that's about to eat you. The whole thing is like being blissfully unaware that you're being devoured after being slowly swathed and made stupid with venom.
“You're in my web now. I’ve come to wrap you up tight 'til it’s time to bite down.”
I fell into the web of The Ugly Organ early in life. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1991, where I was surrounded by a confusing dichotomy of So So Def hip-hop and deep south country music, of which I’ve had my fill. (And decades later, these genres converged into the horrifying chimera of “country rap,” which I try to avoid like a pox.) When my mother moved closer to Florida in 2004, to a town with its own venue for hardcore shows, I fell in with the burgeoning “scene” crowd and discovered a multitude of bands I had never heard before, many of which were either too loud—Underoath, Alexisonfire, Chiodos—or too soft—Bright Eyes, Dashboard Confessional, Iron & Wine—or just too embarrassing—The Starting Line, Hawthorne Heights, Matchbook Romance—for me to truly get into. But, of course, as an impressionable thirteen-year-old kid, I pretended to like them all. I was a chameleon. I wanted to fit in so badly. I pretended so hard that I got a full-body picture of myself on a two-page spread dedicated to the “scene/emo phenomenon” in my school’s yearbook—I was the only picture—with labels and arrows pointing to my ripped-at-the-knees skinny jeans, long-in-the-front-short-in-the-back swoop haircut, patched-and-pinned messenger bag, and forlorn expression as if my still-beating heart had just been torn straight from my chest. (No, I am not making this up.) And, of course, I was embarrassed by the whole yearbook thing immediately after agreeing to do it and, as such, didn’t buy a copy; and I couldn’t find the thing online—so, unfortunately for you, dear reader, I don’t have that very mortifying picture to share with you, but the whole thing does illustrate that I had some self-awareness of my own fakery, even at a young age. But, regardless of all that, I liked to think that I was more than just some scenester, as I had a broader taste in music than the average “emo” kid, having dabbled in 80s pop and art rock for some time after a brief obsession with in-game just-driving-around-listening-to-the-very-80s-radio in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for hours while being high on child-approved amphetamines. What I’m trying to get at is: I was ripe for The Ugly Organ when it was released in 2003, but it was very much the black sheep of the emo scene at that time; everyone liked “The Recluse” and “Art is Hard,” but the rest of the album was considered kinda strange by the scenester elite, a bit too high-brow, a bit too artsy. But it wasn’t too high-brow for me—I was primed for The Ugly Organ, and it quickly became one of my favorite albums; and, at the time, I thought I understood it—the fact that Tim Kasher could point to himself and say what I heard as, “I’m a monster, haha! Look how self-aware I am! It’s cool to hate yourself!” was, to me, very cool indeed.
“They want to hear my deepest sins, the songs from The Ugly Organ.”
“Herald! Frankenstein” and “Butcher the Song” follow “The Recluse” as a return to the introspective self-loathing from earlier on the record, as if apologizing for regurgitating the same sordid-love-affair bullshit that he so strongly lambasted just minutes before. “Herald! Frankenstein” serves as the interlude to “Butcher the Song,” which is three minutes of the most woe-is-me, self-revulsion ever captured on an early 2000s emo-adjacent recording; the introduction, with cello like the stalking of a great white shark accented with echoing steel percussion, creates a harrowing atmosphere of anticipatory dread before exploding in the same dreadful cadence atop Kasher’s lyrical butcher knife that relentlessly hacks away at his own contrived persona. Before this, it could have been argued that the songs were about a character—The Ugly Organist—but this facade slips away as Kasher tears down the fourth wall and starts referring to himself directly: “So rub it in with your dumb lyrics. Yeah, that's the time and place to wring out your bullshit. And each album I'll get shit on a little more, 'Whose Tim's latest whore? Now, that's not fair—no, that's just obscene. I'll stop speaking for you if you stop speaking for me.” The veil has been lifted. The Ugly Organist is speaking directly on behalf of Tim, or vice versa—it’s impossible to tell because they’re both the same person.
“What a day to sever such ugly extremities. ‘What a lovely day,’ says the butcher as he raises his arm.”
Tim then turns around and does the exact same thing he was so critical of—again—belting out two more ballads about failed relationships. “Driftwood: A Fairy Tale” churns with the same lullaby energy as “The Recluse,” only this time comparing himself to Pinocchio in a relationship in which the spark has died, and he is now bored of his partner but insists that nothing is wrong while continuing to lie about still being in love, his nose growing each time he “proves it,” before being found out and cast out to sea as driftwood. “A Gentleman Caller” follows like a hurricane of punches to the face, the cello being bowed so aggressively that it sounds like a trumpet and the distortion on the guitar amp turned to eleven in what amounts to my favorite song on the record; a three-minute mood swing, the first half representing the visceral beginnings of a love affair both musically and literally—”You say you want to get even? You say you want to get your bad man good? Well, are you in the mood?”—where the guitar and the cello converge so well that it’s almost impossible to figure out where one ends and the other begins; and the second half representing the somber morning after, regretfully lying in bed next to the gentleman caller who just smooth-talked you into one of the biggest mistakes of your life.
“I'm not looking for a lover, all those lovers are liars…”
“A Gentleman Caller,” “Driftwood: A Fairytale,” and “The Recluse” can be taken as examples of the sellout songs Kasher bemoans on “Art is Hard”; songs about personal love affairs and misery that cash in and boost record sales, all designed to be chanted by an audience of sycophants; and considering the context these songs find themselves in bed with, it’s not a coincidence that they function in this manner. These songs were perfectly positioned to be catchy, emo-adjacent, chantable hits containing subject matter that the fans wanted, but they are positioned within such a clever milieu of self-awareness and loathing that it makes the songs feel as if they’re tongue-in-cheek and fully aware of themselves. Tim Kasher knows what he’s doing; he’s playing the audience a little bit, but he’s also using this vehicle of self-hatred to continue doing what he has always done: sing about the misery he so hates to sing about. In a way, he’s found a clever way to cheat the system. The Ugly Organ proves this out with every song; it is one of the most self-hating, woe-is-me albums ever recorded—and, in a way, one of the most self-indulgent albums ever recorded because of it. It is so steeped in Tim Kasher’s own self that, on the surface, it’s hard not to see The Ugly Organ as some sort of post hoc justification of his own bullshit. But is it really that shallow? Is it that easy to hand-wave away? Well, I’ve only covered the first half of the record—and I’m not about to come to your own conclusions for you.
“My ego's like my stomach, it keeps shitting what I feed it.”
In many ways, Cursive’s The Ugly Organ and I were made for each other. We're both unflaggingly self-aware, cynical, and critical of everything—especially ourselves. If you have read any of my previous work, you know that it's steeped in self-hatred, self-mockery, and critical—sometimes unfair—analysis of my own bullshit, while at the same time bemoaning the fact that I can’t seem to shut up about those same things; as if one of the many reasons I hate myself is because these are the only things I have to talk about, and The Ugly Organ sits in that same psychic space. The Ugly Organ and I are a match made in heaven. And when I first heard The Ugly Organ—when I was much younger—I thought I had the album all figured out. I thought it was very cool to hate myself, to point out my own flaws and revel in the fact that I was able to detest myself with such poignant clarity; in a way, I still think it’s cool: I have the utmost respect for those who are brutally honest about themselves, those who know their own bullshit and call it out, and this is certainly one of the appeals of The Ugly Organ. But simply being able to point these things out isn’t cool in and of itself—it’s only cool when you do something productive with that information. You can't wallow in self-hatred forever—you would stagnate, get nothing done, and drag everyone down around you. You have to do something with the negative energy—you have to use it to build a better you.
“The organ’s playing my song, but this song’s gone on too long.”
It tracks that the more self-aware an animal becomes, the more they tend to hate themselves. Surely, the human condition is a complicated thing, counterintuitive almost. We are born into these flesh balloons packed full of mushy organs, all working in tandem to keep us alive, but one of these organs seemingly works against our best interest, enabling us to hate ourselves, makes us want to die; that ugly organ is none other than the brain. The fact that the brain can make us loathe ourselves with every fiber of our being seems to contradict the perhaps evolutionary drive to not suck on the end of a revolver and end it all. But underneath great ugliness is often some terrible truth just waiting to be uncovered. Maybe the brain, when it tells us something horrible about ourselves, is trying to show us something, something true about ourselves, something that needs to be addressed, something that needs to be changed. Maybe the ugly organ is only ugly so that we may use that ugliness as motivation to better ourselves and the world around us.
Or maybe Cursive’s The Ugly Organ is literally just about large keyboards with pipes—who knows?
You have to listen to the record in full to find out.