 |
|
Cursive
|
Cursive with Capgun Coup
Wednesday • Below Zero Lounge
Think being a Cursive fan is difficult? Imagine being a member. Since 1995, the Omaha band has released two emotionally charged concept albums, broken up, reformed and followed up their most acclaimed album with a rarities package and an open-ended hiatus.
Cursive supports the adage that great drama makes great art. The band coalesced when former Slowdown Virginia members Tim Kasher, Matt Maginn and Steve Pedersen and drummer Clint Schnase assembled to create a unique blend of baroque Pop, crackling Emo and inwardly directed lyrics. The year after their 1997 Crank! debut, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, the quartet imploded. A year after The Storms of Early Summer: Semantics of Song, their final album on Saddle Creek (how many bands have a posthumous sophomore label debut?), Cursive reformed with Lullaby of the Working Class guitarist Ted Stevens and recorded 2000's Domestica, a cheery tome about the vitriolic deception of divorce.
In 2001, Cursive welcomed Gretta Cohn, whose sonorous cello gave the band an even richer melancholic sense, then followed 2002's Burst and Bloom with The Ugly Organ, arguably one of their finest albums and an overall 2003 high point. An emotionally wrought and brilliant compendium of sexual dysfunction and spiralling self-doubt, The Ugly Organ was almost universally praised, earning comparisons to Fugazi, Tom Waits, Smashing Pumpkins and the Cure, who tapped Cursive to open their 2004 Curiosa tour. Cursive then went on indefinite hiatus; Cohn left after the 2005 rarities compilation The Difference Between Houses and Homes, and Kasher concentrated on his Good Life side project. Cursive regrouped as a quartet for 2006's Happy Hollow, uncharacteristically focused on external issues (politics, religion, soulless consumerism).
The band's penchant for turnover continued with Schnase's 2007 departure and the addition of the colorfully named Cornbread Compton. What next? Stay turned for another exciting episode of As Cursive Tours. (This show serves as the official kickoff of CityBeat's role as caretakers of the MidPoint Music Festival.) (Buy tickets, check out performance times and find nearby bars and restaurants here.)
The Carolina Chocolate Drops
Tuesday • Molly Malone's (Covington)
In 2005, multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons channeled all of his musical experience into his exploration of Bluegrass, joining with likeminded friends Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson to form the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The trio's instrumental virtuosity and inherent sense of historical perspective are displayed brilliantly on their debut album, Dona Got a Ramblin' Mind. The Drops formed after meeting at the 2005 Black Banjo Gathering in North Carolina and were ultimately mentored by legendary fiddle master Joe Thompson. The trio covers a wide variety of Bluegrass obscurities with traditional expertise and contemporary abandon, infusing songs from the earliest part of the last century with a modern yet completely appropriate vibrancy.
 |
|
The Carolina Chocolate Drops
|
The obvious lack of African-American Bluegrass musicians makes the Carolina Chocolate Drops distinctively different, and their technical proficiency, intuitive talent and pure passion makes them integral to the long and illustrious Bluegrass lineage in general and an almost solitary entity in enlightening music fans to the history of the black string-band tradition specifically.
"Most black people don't do a lot of this music because there's no context for it," Flemons says. "A black kid growing up doesn't see a black person playing banjo or guitar and a lot of major black recording artists don't play instruments, not out front performing. We all were just kind of odd ducks in our little ponds, playing the music in the communities that we enjoyed."
And where exactly did the name come from? "A fellow named Howard Armstrong who played fiddle and mandolin from the late '20s on," Flemons says. "He had a group with his brothers early on called the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, and Rhiannon up and said, 'Well, why don't we call ourselves the Carolina Chocolate Drops?' " (Buy tickets, check out performance times and find nearby bars and restaurants here.)
