Cursive - Vitriola (2018)

Six years since their last record, Cursive are back with their eighth album - Vitriola, out 5th October via Big Scary Monsters.Over the past two decades, the band have become known for writing smart, tightly woven concept albums where frontman Tim Kasher turns his unflinching gaze on specific, oftentimes challenging themes, and examines them with an incisively brutal honesty. 2000's Domestica dealt with divorce; 2003's The Ugly Organ tackled art, sex, and relationships; 2006's Happy Hollow skewered organized religion; 2009's Mama, I'm Swollen grappled with the human condition and social morality; and 2012's I Am Gemini explored the battle between good and evil. But the band's remarkable eighth full-length, Vitriola, required a different approach -- one less rigidly themed and more reactionary as the band struggles with existentialism veering towards nihilism and despair; the ways in which society, much like a writer, creates and destroys; and an oncoming dystopia that feels eerily near at hand. For the first time since Happy Hollow, the album reunites Tim Kasher, guitarist/singer Ted Stevens and bassist Matt Maginn with founding drummer Clint Schnase, as well as co-producer Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes, M. Ward, Jenny Lewis) at ARC Studios in Omaha. They're joined by Patrick Newbery on keys (who's been a full-time member for years) and touring mainstay Megan Siebe on cello. Schnase and Maginn are in rare form, picking up right where they left off with a rhythmic lockstep of viscera-vibrating bass and toms, providing a foundation for Kasher and Stevens' intertwining guitars and Newbery and Siebe's cinematic flourishes. The album runs the sonic gamut between rich, resonant melodicism, Hitchcockian anxiety, and explosive catharsis -- and no Cursive album would be complete without scream-along melodies and lyrics that, upon reflection, make for unlikely anthems.Previous Praise for Mama, I'm Swollen and Gemini:".a dizzying range of amped-up hardcore ('In The Now'), horn-powered country rock ('I Couldn't Love You')