What was it about that show?  Was it the surprise live energy from opening hip-hop artist P.O.S. that widened our impressed eyes?  And I’m not speaking for everyone here, but maybe it was the way he got us to break out of our white-kid shells?  It started with our hands which found themselves up and over our heads.  Many for the first time.  I was surrounded by hundreds of elbows bending to the pulse of his rhymes. Fingers pointed magically and then: Bend: Bend: Bend to the beat.  Muscles that us white kids rarely use, finally got a good stretching.   He definitely had something to do with the energy in the room.  It reminded me the Pelican/Tortoise show that I saw in ‘04, when Chicago hip-hop artist Beans took the stage at the Metro and blew the minds of every suburban kid in the room as he Rocked To The Rhythm.

Of course the real show was at the hands and mouths of Cursive.  After taking the stage and simply stating “We’re here to play our old stuff. And we’re here to play our new stuff.” Front man, Tim Kasher and company held true to their proclamation by playing an array of songs, some of which included:  Recluse, From The Hips, and Art Is Hard.  The animated faces and the intensity of each note played or sung resonated between every ticket holder in the room, and probably leaked out of the venue and onto the street a little bit.  The night was topped off by a 4 song encore, and a spider monkey impersonation by Kasher.   Perching on amps and support beams surrounding the stage and grabbing the microphone nearest his migration he continued singing and playing.  After playing amidst the pink and orange lighting systems in the rafters, he reluctantly ended the show by jumping off of the bass drum of which he had strategically crawled onto.  Genius.

But the crowd? We weren’t nearly as rowdy as I thought we would be.  I went to a Killer’s show that had a crowd way crazier than this one, and honestly I was expecting it to get a lot more rambunctious.  I think you will agree with me when I say that Cursive puts on a live show that needs to be absorbed.  It seemed that everyone was too glued to the stage presence that the band offered  and that no one was willing to look away.  Perhaps it was because I didn’t have to worry about an elbow to the face as much as I thought I was going to but I can’t help but say; I felt a certain air of musical kinship in the room.  I felt it from my head to my laced up toes.  Although it actually might have been the occasional water drops falling on the crowd from the ceiling overhead, and the energy in my feet might have been because I was wearing the same pink Converse that lead singer Tim Kasher was wearing, but what accounts for the  rest of the crowd?  I cannot remember a show where the crowd was so supportive.  I cannot remember another time when I saw a giant of a man pushing his way through average sized people in order to stand front-and-center of a shoulder to shoulder crowd, and then turn around with a jolly grin that Santa would be jealous of and proclaim, “I just gotta get in front.. because I just GOTTA sing!”?  To which the crowd that he towered over, all tilted their heads a bit to the left, smiled, and encouraged the giant to continue. 

Thank you to Casey McPherrin for these front row shots.