It was surreal to see this band as it was formed 20 years later, still singing through the modern classic The Michael Jordan of Drunk Driving tumbling over into Disposable Everything off their newest record. They chatted with folks between songs, completely just two dudes up on a stage. At one point, a Santa hat was given to Ben Gallaty, who captured the look extremely well. Their sound was sparse with just a guitar and stand-up bass, but they both pulled their notes full to flood into the crowd. AJJ’s most recent record Disposable Everything is definitely an “end of the world” record, nihilistic folk punk in every way AJJ was expected to deliver. They sang through songs about pride, waste, corporations, and the human greed destroying the planet and killing the humanity of what we have left to offer. It’s a change from their earlier discography, which focused through the same semi-nihilism ideas, but from a very personal view. Now, their messages encompass everyone, framed to describe the world at large, and the end of it all. Sean Bonnette’s voice rang out in a fully half-step-off pitch at every point where it mattered, it was a beautiful set. They closed out with a favorite, Big Bird, and the crowd sang and cried along while the final piercing notes of AJJ howled around us.

Room is a generous term to describe The Raccoon Motel venue, a tall but narrow side to the main bar, it’s like Gabe’s upstairs had a wall built halfway lengthwise and shoved a sold out show into the space, people like sardines in a quaint tin. The stage was no different, stickered amps, two guitars, a bass, a firetruck red tambourine, a synth set, a drum kit with the newest Cursive album cover skinned onto the front, and a fucking electric cello sat squished together on a stage that would struggle to fit a mattress, with a massacre of Hy-Vee plastic water bottles scattered around.

That one dude (don’t know his name but remember his voice) who announces these kinds of shows with his crazy impressive yelling stepped on stage to introduce a poet to prelude the Cursive set. A man read out his poem he wrote from emotions seeing Cursive perform when they were last in Iowa, I don’t recall what he said, but his words struck into me that this would be a special show, that could affect us in the same way to be moved into poetry. His words ended, and five people walked on stage, the sixth (Tim Kasher) less walking than bouncing into his spot. 5/6ths of the band was wearing a button-up shirt that night.

This tour formed for the release of the most recent Cursive album, Devourer. Released last year, Devourer is this maniacal end-of-the-world frustration and this idea of the great consumer, an imperialistic devourer that controls our lives, and the very personal imperialism that we find eating away at our own selves. Regaling earthquakes, volcanoes, gasoline advertisements, and self-immolation DIY, and the Cursive protagonist’s own denial of reality as they’re stuck within their own consumptions.

“Happiness is in the devouring. I saw our future, and I want to go back,” Cursive opened the final show of their tour with Consumers. This band has mastered building melodies out of simple riffs for decades, somehow reinventing a blowing heaviness within each pattern. It’s so simple, yet never boring. They continue into The Casualty, another dense melodic tune as the set continues weaving tracks around their full discography from the past 20 years. During a break, Tim Kasher justifies that since this is the last night of their tour, “we have a lot of fucking off to get out of our systems.” As Cursive gets comfortable on the twin-size stage, the singer Tim and cellist Megan Siebe continue to get lost in the throes of their hammering tones. The rest of the band plays incredibly with a much more subdued energy, the others with that desperate gleam of an exhausted runner in their last mile of a month-long marathon.

As the set continued, you could notice a distinct difference in the energy between their older music, and their most recent album. Tracks like The Recluse and Caveman from their younger years were played with a loose recklessness, they felt like a band of 20-somethings playing with lazy exaggeration to cause a scene. That same recklessness became much more intentional, almost a nihilistic abandon during The Avalanche of Our Demise and tracks from Devourer, still filling the hall with the same thundering energy but with a stronger intention.

Cursive continued their unburdening “fucking off” spiral, and the crowd joined right in with them. All around, the vast sprawls of middle-aged dudes in beanies and baseball caps screamed along, a drunk birthday girl and her even drunker friends all dressed in tiaras shoving and shrieking against the rail, before collapsing under the weight of the tallest moshpit I’ve experienced heralding the first thrums of Art is Hard. I’m not exactly one for self-preservation, but even under the intoxicating cello pulls of that tune I’m not fucking about in the midst of eight dudes with perfect elbows swinging into my eye level. Immediately after finishing the song, Tim threw the shot back he had so tenderly carried on stage with him as it became increasingly obvious he was at least reasonably hammered, whipping his ridiculous curtains on his head all around.

Megan Siebe on the cello really pulls Cursive together as a band, the final and fundamental piece that separates them apart from the whole slew of indie-rock bands out there. Seeing her play live was incredible, bridging some gap between classical technique and rock with her skill and intense energy. She also had a wee finger monster stuck onto a knob on her cello, mad respect. I’ve been a huge fan of their music for years, one of the bands that really dragged me into this divorced-dad-indie-rock shithole that we love and adore. Cursive as a band has changed so much, and not at all since their humble Omaha beginnings. It was really lovely to see them at the end of this tour, to really experience how they’ve stayed exactly the same yet changed so much, their fundamental uniqueness staying so consistent yet fresh for the past 20 years. They closed out their main set with From the Hips, with nothing more needing to be said.

Huge thanks to The Raccoon Motel for supporting KRUI, to check out their upcoming events (or to see Kermit hanging off a mountain lion) visit them in downtown Davenport. They’re hosting a record party on New Years Eve. Thanks as well to Marshall Rogers for sharing these lovely photos.

The post The end of the world written in Andrew Jackson’s script, Cursive with AJJ at The Raccoon Motel, December 21 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

KRUI crossed paths with them on their blaze across the Midwest last March, where they offered a glimpse behind their curtain of sound. It’s a truly mesmerizing flavor of shoegaze, emphasizing the dreamiest elements without losing its drive. Live, their She Only Said EP was delivered in an all-out assault, forgoing the typical breaks between songs in favor of an ever evolving medley, delivering punishing yet enchanting waves from a static sea emanating from their guitars, through which vocalist Aislinn Ritchie’s haunting melodies hover, searing yet serene.

Despite coming off of as big a year for the band as 2024 was, Glixen shows no signs of slowing down. The release of their latest EP Quiet Pleasures comes paired with news of their first headlining tour across the United States, spanning all four corners of the country and closing with not one, but two appearances on this year’s Coachella stage. Seeming to adopt a similarly sparing level of prolificity to fellow shoegaze cohorts Her New Knife, Glixen has espoused their belief in patience as a virtue by way of their careful release schedule, allowing the atmospheric echoes of She Only Said to reverberate about the shoegaze scene before finally following it up this winter.

Quiet Pleasures manages to take the sound Glixen was working with on their prior EP, and work it into an entirely new gear. It takes more influence from grunge and doomgaze than the more conventional dream pop melodies displayed on She Only Said. The first track “all tied up” sees chugging guitars darkly glimmering, creating a distinct contrast with Ritchie’s vocals, which take a more straightforward role than ever before. Plying yearning discordant melodies, her slightly off-kilter sighs meander amidst the great discord of the instrumentation, perfectly yet imperfectly placed.

“lick the star” features an introduction with the band easily at its dreamiest as singular licks are cast off into a nebulous atmosphere, all at once coming together in a metaphorical big bang. The song then launches another attack on the ears, ending as suddenly as it began, with feedback twisting and withering in the air. “sick silent” sees the band at, for lack of a better word, their evilest. Ritchie reaches into her deeper registers, and the guitars creak and groan under the duress of casting wave after wave of sonic bliss into the aether. Drummer Kiere Johnson is at his best here, absolutely obliterating the drums before him. This is all to prompt guitar player Esteban Santana’s vocal debut, harmonizing gorgeously to deliver a twisted sermon of noise. The track “avoid” sees Glixen at an interesting intersection of soaring darkness, with the tempo slowing significantly as Ritchie’s vocals more resemble moans, stretching bar after bar over the track’s runtime.

Finally, the EP closes with “shut me down”, easily Glixen’s most punishing number up until this point. Once again, Johnson demolishes his drum set for our entertainment as Sonia Garcia’s bass work lights the way forward. The weight played with on this track feels more reminiscent to the punishment of metal acts than the gossamer filigree of She Only Said, taking a left turn even further away from pop sensibility and deeper into a world of dissonance. For a band already moving up the ranks of contemporaries in their field and wandering new avenues, one can only ask: What comes next?

The post A Message From the Void with Glixen’s “Quiet Pleasures” EP appeared first on KRUI Radio.