Who wouldn’t divorce Tim Kasher?
The singer-songwriter, better known as the frontman of Nebraska’s Cursive, has made a name for himself by singing about his own suffering, making for a mixed bag musically.
Kasher is always taking a different subject for each album — his divorce in Cursive’s Domestica or artistic success in The Ugly Organ.
Kasher’s latest solo album, The Game of Monogamy, is another plunge into the depths of adult life and all its loneliness or the “epic” journey of Kasher’s 30s.
As he wrote in The Ugly Organ about continuing on as an artist: “First you don’t, you don’t succeed/ you gotta recreate your misery.”
The album begins with a short, ironically schmaltzy instrumental, “Monogamy Overture,” before transitioning into “A Grown Man.”
“I am a grown man/ How did this happen?” sings Kasher a cappella before he goes on to express how little he wants to be what he thinks a grown man is.
Just to get it out of the way: Kasher’s vocal delivery is a personal pet peeve. Every note for him is its own supposedly epic plateau, proving absolutely nothing will be simple with him. It gets exaggerated in the opener, and it pervades the rest of the album. It makes him sound too close to Flight of the Conchords for this critic’s comfort.
But on the whole, The Game of Monogamy is a lucidly constructed album. The old Sgt. Pepper bleed-first-song-into-second-song trick is applied heavily and successfully so. At least the way he arranges his songs works, if not all of the songs themselves.
Most obnoxious among them are the bookends to the album.
The closer, “Monogamy,” a preening strings and gentle guitar ballad to match the “Monogamy Overture” builds to an ironic chorus of “Monogamy!” made to sound like it was delivered from the clouds, just to emphasize how very proud Kasher is of his cynicism, in case you missed it.
In between them, tracks such as “Strays” and “The Prodigal Husband” are precocious and cloying acoustic ballads, while “A Grown Man” and “I’m Afraid I’m Gonna Die Here” do a much better job of making us commiserate.
It all works so much better when listeners get something in return for accepting the singer’s sadness. “Cold Love” offers a solid hook — a break from Kasher’s saccharine, low-talking seriousness.
The instrumentation is intricate and new enough, but there is something sterile about it, which gets to the real problem with this album.
Kasher just sounds like he is sticking his voice into prefabricated songs that are molded for his diatribes. There are organs and horns to add to the standard bass, guitar and drums formula, but the studio gloss it gets is just another level of narcissism.
At best, Kasher is a polarizing figure. A lot of what he has done is great, The Ugly Organ being the primary example. But when he falls, he falls hard. There is nothing to this music other than someone else’s sadness.
RATING: 2.5 stars out of 5
waldo@umdbk.com
