Since Cursive’s Domestica in 2000, Tim Kasher and company have elevated their (don’t say it) emo (gah!) theatrics to the concept album stage. It was a bold move that could have gone horribly awry, but instead produced a couple of fantastic albums (Domestica, The Ugly Organ) and some great songs about writing songs to boot. The formula evolved thusly: instead of just singing songs about a bunch of fucked-up characters, they first introduce themselves as the band that will be brining us songs about a bunch of fucked-up characters. This technique, known in some circles as “breaking the fourth wall” or “meta-fiction”, has served Cursive well in the past on songs like “Art is Hard” and “Sink to the Beat”.

Now they’re back with a new album, and this time they’ve traded melodic cello for grating horns and they’ve switched from glorifying the failure to be a faithful lover to glorifying the failure to being a faithful religious adherent. But after a couple of years spent milking the meta-fiction cow, Happy Hollow ventures hazardously close to self-parody.

The familiar cheating lovers, sloppy drunks, and doe-eyed beauties are all here, but this time around they’re augmented by middle-aged housewives sick of the routine, sexually repressed priests, and feckless young barflies whose listlessness becomes their ticket to a tour (or two, or five) in that foreign war. Kasher’s projects his personal disillusion with relationships and sobriety onto the kind of faith over which such wars are fought, blasting through overtly religious lyrics with the same vitriol his characters use to slander a dirty, cheating ex-girlfriend.

The band’s always been about grating guitars playing queasy chord progressions over lyrics just as queasy. Throwing four-part horn arrangements into the mix seemed like a terrible idea from the minute I heard about it, and songs like “Big Bang” prove my fears well-founded. At their best, but only occasionally the horns add pleasing complexity to Cursive’s palette. At their worst, they sound like Chicago covering Korn. Yuck.

The album’s most cringe-worthy song, the curtain call, “Hymns for the Heathen”, recaps each of the album’s tracks with banal succinctness. I mean, did they really need to point out for us that “Big Bang” could be summed up as “The tree stump of knowledge, choking on Adam’s Apple” or that “Dorothy Dreams of Tornadoes” could be subtitled “Sodom falls to ashes”? And does calling all your songs “hymns” really make them any more worthy of canonization?

When Cursive gets it right, though, they get it right, and Happy Hollow’s not all valleys. “Bad Sects”, the album’s most pleasing track in the traditional Cursive mold, is the story of a disillusioned priest who gets a little too cozy with one of his protégés. Kasher conversationally peels of lines like, “A new recruit / 25 years old / he joined the habit with a chip on the shoulder / some night’s he’d proclaim his preference / but only flatback drunk on a bottle of Jameson,” over the familiar indie rock hip hop stomp groove that Cursive does so well. It works on multiple levels like any good Bible story, narrating the friar’s tale while simultaneously lulling the listener into a type of uncomfortable self-reflection the way that “The Recluse” from The Ugly Organ did. The band’s compositional wayfaring is well served on this track, which, like many of the album’s songs, avoids most of rock music’s structural conventions.

The fist-pumping strains of, “This city, this city is killin’ us,” on “Dorothy Dreams of Tornadoes” is the sum of all songs for Happy Hollow. It’s hard not to feel the pull of death encroaching upon the denizens of this dystopian stand-in for Anytown, USA, and here the horns actually heighten the drama. However, as the town openly loses its moral compass about halfway through the album, with Kasher singing “Since you’ve been away on holiday, it’s getting harder to give a shit,” on “Retreat!” it’s just too easy to take it the wrong way.

Happy Hollow is less consistent than anything Cursive’s done lately. Let’s hope they remember the eggs they broke creating this omelet when they go back into the kitchen to cook up their next dish.

Grade: C-

Review by Shelby Rushing