Pitchfork

Wait, people actually care about lyrics? Without them we couldn't have the same powerful, personal connections with people who make songs? Okay, fine. Words are important. But screams are better. That's something Cursive frontman Tim Kasher seemed to understand a decade ago, when he ripped out his heart, sewed it on his sleeve, and called it Such Blinding Stars for the Starving Eyes. But around Y2K, a funny thing happened-- he seemed to decide he'd rather his lyrics be understood than his voice be heard.

The result of that millennial crisis was Domestica, Cursive's first concept album, which told of the messy decline of a relationship in stanzas even the tinnitus-stricken could discern. Kasher still screamed plenty, but mixed in were plain-English zingers like, "The night has fallen down the staircase/ And I, for one, have felt its bruises." By the time The Ugly Organ dropped in 2003, even his throatiest bray had taken on tone.

For the scream-deprived, the band last year offered The Difference Between Houses and Homes, a career-spanning compendium of B-sides and rarities that had a whiff of posthumousness to it. Now Happy Hollow confirms the death: Cursive's salad days are over. They're officially a words band, more interested in meaning than feeling. And they're celebrating by tackling some big topics.

Happy Hollow is simultaneously Cursive's most and least worldly album yet, with songs encompassing both infinite realms (the universal "Big Bang") and mundane ones (suburban lead single "Dorothy at Forty"). All the while, Kasher mixes messages and metaphors, bitching far too much for his own good.

The first seven songs kill, but the album's second half drags on longer than a Def Jam debut. Even so, there's still stuff to dig. The single is a surging mass of vitriol- and trumpet-packed orchestral emo, while "Bad Sects" is one of the best American Football songs never written. The latter lays down a slow, stargazing groove while Kasher unveils a feathery, unexpected falsetto. It also features the album's consummate lyrics, accessing the spiritual through the quotidian: "A new recruit, 25 years old/ He joined the habit with a chip on his shoulder/ Some nights he'd proclaim his preference/ But only flat-back drunk on a bottle of Jameson."

Tales of lost faith permeate the album. "This is all we are, we simply exist," sings Kasher by way of an introduction on "Opening the Hymnal/Babies", though it's unclear at first whether the line constitutes an apostasy or just an observation. If you ask the brassy "Big Bang" it's the former: "In a world of entropy, why can't we just simply be," goes the song's pivotal line, kicks underlining each word. On "Dorothy at Forty", a meditation on hypocrisy in picket-fence America that uses The Wizard of Oz as an allegory, Kasher sings, "Dreamers never live, only dream of it." His storytelling may have grown more abstract since Domestica, but his existential observations have never been pithier.

Cursive could be a great rags-to-riches story: Catholic schoolkids purge repressed childhood memories by starting emo band, grow up to be a sort of Hold Steady for high schoolers. But the band's maturation has come in awkward fits, as if forced. Growth is something bands can't force-- it either happens or it doesn't. And even when it works out, people will still say your first album was your best. That's just life. Tough reality, but Tim Kasher will probably write an album about it someday.