#the faint

[possible-streetwear]

#Ladytron #electro #gig poster #indie #poster #Affiche #ladytron #electronic #electroclash #electropop #electronics #music #gig posters #electronic pop #synthpop #affiche #concert poster #art #graphic #artwork #design #new wave #css #posters music #rock poster #poster design #music posters #poster art #posters #the faint

[crimebird]

was at the same show as @powercool 15 years before we first met

#the faint #how did i really meet a stranger who is just like me fr #and find love in the club

[nativeofvenus]

#the faint #i disappear #music

[craycraybluejay]

None of you know the schizo weirdness of having specifically this song stuck in your head and it making you Feel Weird

Anyway fellow schizos get it stuck in your head so u can know what I mean >:)

#possibly a repetition trigger? ill put the tag just to be safe #tw repetition #actually schizospec #actually stpd #actually schizotypal #stuck in my head #music #my spotify #the faint #Spotify

[bakedbakermom]

Sick to death of either being tortured by ads or the slow bleed of a monthly subscription. I said fuck it, uninstalled Spotify, and found this old friend in my glovebox. He's still kicking after 18 years.

#fuck Spotify #piracy forever #dresden dolls #daft punk #the dead 60s #the cranberries #cursive #the dead weather #the faint #flogging molly #i used to be cool #and this is proof #ipod #his name is ichabod and i love him forever

[cryingonthefreeway]

#music #violent #the faint #fav #SoundCloud #I can’t believe this song is over 20 years old

[haunted4ever]

April 21, 2001

Holy Name Fieldhouse, Omaha

x

#conor oberst #desaparecidos #bright eyes #saddle creek records #2001 #emo #punk #indie #cursive #the faint

[thecoparoom]

March 2003 in Boston

Boston Phoenix

#Papa Roach #Glassjaw #Taking Back Sunday #MCR #MyChemicalRomance #The Used #Simple Plan #The White Stripes #The Faint #Bright Eyes

[2goo-p]

#the faint #music #I disappear #listen no one else posted it here and bandcamp is Free

[hellsmouthcove]

from cursive’s the ugly organ 2014 reissue lyric booklet

We should've seen The Ugly Organ coming. 

When Tim Kasher reunited Cursive in 1999 and produced Domestica a year later, it was a warning sign. Cursive hadn’t exactly whispered on Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes and The Storms of Early Summer: Semantics of Song, but Domestica was the kind of album that hurt, that could bruise your faith in relationships. As cathartic as it felt, it portended more storms on the horizon.

When the Burst and Bloom EP arrived in 2001, the winds kicked up. Guitarist Ted Stevens said as much on “Tall Tales, Telltales”: “Four winds converge upon a point where your compass / spirals ‘round in useless motions mocking everything.” The maelstrom: It’s where Cursive thrives. The EP shuddered with the band’s accelerating momentum, from the self-referential “Sink to the Beat” to the almost palpable weariness from meaningless hook-ups in “Fairytales Tell Tales.” Hearing Burst and Bloom, there was no doubt that something big lurked on the horizon for Cursive. 

Yet The Ugly Organ still surprised us: that the band could be this ferocious, this ambitious, this unsettling. Kasher had turned his lyrics on himself before – see Domestica – but never with such dismissive disdain. “Cut it out – your self-inflicted pain is getting too routine,” he howls in “Art is Hard.” During the regretful morning-after of “The Recluse,” he sings, “Oh Christ, I’m not that desperate, am I? / Oh no, oh God, I am.” He sings from the perspective of his embittered significant other in “Butcher the Song,” “So rub it in in your dumb lyrics / Yeah, that’s the time and place to wring out your bullshit.” She returns, even angrier, in “Bloody Murderer,” saying, “When I was yours, you fled the scene / Now you can’t wash your hands of me.” When The Ugly Organ closes with “Staying Alive” and its lilting refrain, “The worst is over,” that’s not necessarily hope we hear. It could just as easily be resignation. The worst is over, but this isn’t much better. 

As on Domestica, Kasher signs about a character on The Ugly Organ, but just as on Domestica, it never feels far removed from him. “Butcher the Song” even uses his name, while “Art is Hard” name-checks Cursive. Kasher fell under the sway of the concept-album idea on Domestica, using his own life to heavily inform the album’s story of a failing relationship. It’s easy to see the same on The Ugly Organ and its bracingly unsentimental portrait of a touring musician (named “the Ugly Organist”) and the dysfunction that penetrates all aspects of his life. He’s going through the motions artistically (“Some Red Handed Sleight of Hand,” “Art is Hard”), his relationship with his significant other is a destructive cycle of infidelity and bitter recrimination (“The Recluse,” “Butcher the Song,” “A Gentleman Caller,” “Bloody Murderer”), and redemption seems unlikely (“Sierra,” “Staying Alive”). The flights of fancy of “Driftwood: a Fairy Tale” and “Harold Weathervein” recall the stormy, water-logged imagery of Burst and Bloom. “Weatherman, do you feel?” Stevens asks on the latter. “Is it stormy inside of your veins?”

The Ugly Organ made landfall on March 4, 2003, the same day as Evanescence's Fallen and roughly two weeks before the start of the Iraq War. The darkest days of the Bush Era were settling 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).

Plenty of those reviews referenced emo, which had splintered off from punk in the ‘80s but devolved into the flimsiest of marketing gimmicks by the new millennium. By 2003, the third wave of emo was crashing with a deluge of bands all too eager to ride their angsty pop to stardom. This was the year Alex Trebek referenced Cursive’s Saddle Creek labelmates Bright Eyes in a question whose correct response was “What is emo?” Cursive had started in the mid-’90s during emo’s second wave, and the band had little in common with the genre’s millennial torch-bearers, but reviewers had lumped them all together the same. “Cursive might just expand emo’s demographic to include the angsty 22-to-32 grad-student demographic,” went one typically positive-but-condescending review.

Not that The Ugly Organ lacked emo signifiers. Its confessional tone, jaundiced take on relationships, and self-loathing outed it, but the album’s ambition trumped any tidy labels. Calling it “daring,” The A.V. Club’s Noel Murray wrote in his “best music of 2003” list that “The Ugly Organ carries navel-gazing to compellingly bloody, winsomely sad, and even admirably pretentious extremes.”

By the end of 2003, Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, and Toby Keith had some of the top-selling albums of the year, with OutKast, the White Stripes, and Fountains of Wayne topping that year’s Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics’ Poll. If anything, the emo breakthrough of that year was Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism (#34 on Pazz & Jop), the band’s final release before ascending to major-label stardom.

But anyone with even a passing familiarity of music history knows that the charts and polls hardly tell the whole story. With The Ugly Organ, Cursive had made a landmark for itself and Saddle Creek. It was the label’s 51st release and the second in what my colleague Marc Hawthorne called “Saddle Creek’s holy trinity” in his liner notes for The Faint’s Danse Macabre reissue: Danse Macabre, The Ugly Organ, and Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. (I’d argue more for LIFTED or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground on that count, but I’ll save that for the next time I see Marc.)

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 Songs 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, 1977” – and two songs from the single for “The Recluse.” It’s an exhaustive – and exhausting – snapshot of a band realizing its power and wielding it for maximum impact.

And then Cursive was gone. Again. Taking another one of its intermittent hiatuses. An unease has accompanied every album after The Ugly Organ that it could be the last one – no, for real this time. Maybe because The Ugly Organ capped an unprecedented productive streak, ending a three-record, three-year run with an album that can’t help but reflect the effort that went into it. The exhaustion, the ambivalence, the doubt, it all bleeds out of those 12 tracks. At the end of “Staying Alive,” the “ghost chorus” referenced in the liner notes sings, “The worst is over, Doo do Doo do Doo do Doo doo.” On second thought, maybe it's neither hope nor resignation, but simple relief. The storm has passed. And it was a motherfucker. 

Kyle Ryan

The A.V. Club

#i am posting #music.png #cursive #cursives domestica #the ugly organ #saddle creek #bright eyes #the faint #2003

[houseishungry]

This is what happens when you work with kids

#a quality post by me #last fm #music #toadies #will wood #modest mouse #thao and the get down stay down #toh kay #barney the dinosaur #the faint #stellastar* #Darcy clay

[skaisthebestformofmusic]

#The Faint #Violent #SoundCloud

[sleazeandscum]

#posed to death #the faint #danse macabre #2001 #Spotify

[cryingonthefreeway]

#music #the faint #falling out of love at this volume #SoundCloud