so, there's the cello - and this is supposed to be the high point.

what was i listening to in mid-2003? mostly constellation records stuff, and a bunch of dying rock bands from the 80s and 90s. i'd pretty much had it with rock music at the time. i would have been open to a good punk or grunge band if i stumbled upon it, but the minimal exposure i had to the term 'emo' did not generate much interest in me. i thought it was trash, as a form. you would have been more likely to find me at a jazz festival than an emo concert. if anybody mentioned cursive to me at the time, i don't remember it. i didn't go back and try to sort through this stuff for the first time until stuff like la dispute and defeater started coming out, which piqued my interest in the form for the first time since junior high school, which was roughly fifteen years earlier.

so, my memory of this record is precisely zero: i don't remember it at all. i wasn't remotely into this kind of music, at the time...

i'm going to give it a careful listen, but my first impression is that it sounds like larks' tongue in aspic watered down for the masses in the sense that it's opaque and sort of ugly, but not in a complicated or abstract enough way to be interesting. it's like weezer doing crimson covers, which is not a very exciting prospect.

i'll give it at least two listens, though. promise.

.....and.....

no. it's a boring C. at best.

they have enough instruments on stage at this point to be doing something more interesting than this, but they just aren't doing it. the cellist is just hanging out, really. it's better in the parts where it's referencing the cure, but this term i previously used - pedestrian - remains the best description of it.

https://cursive.bandcamp.com/album/the-ugly-organ-2