Cursive

I’m sure you’ve witnessed it before, when you hear a band/artist and you unconsciously and almost automatically began to form a pre-conceived notion of how they’ll look based on their music. Before I go off topic, Cursive were one of those bands, they had a pop rock edge sound to their music boarding hard rock, listen to In The Now, but they were far from the skinny, hipster looking bands that dominated the festival, they all looked like aging dads experiencing a mid-life crisis: a far cry from their young hipster dominated audience.

I wasn’t meant to see Cursive; the Vivian Girls had a hard act to follow from Duchess Says and unfortunately for them and my sister, who likes them, they underperformed, so we walked out of their performance and made our way to Cursive, a band I wanted to see but not as much as my sister wanted to see Vivian Girls.  The room was almost full, but just like 65dos I could feel there were hardcore fans bordering us, and I was right, people were cheering when they played certain songs and began singing along to them. Once again I was encapsulated into the moment, and found myself feeling a bit sad that my ears had been missing out on this unusual band from Nebraska, I say unusual, because of their appearance and I think they were the first band that didn’t conjure up other bands in my mind, except I did think one of the guitarists looked like Earl's brother from My Name Is Earl.

As the gig went on, I started to forget about their image and began enjoying the sound; excited to hear what the next song would sound like; and if the lead vocalist could out do his previous high energy performance, and he did. For the fourth to last song, whilst the rest of his band were playing, he climbed up onto one of the speakers to stand onto an extension part of the building so that his head was not far from the ceiling, and someone passed him his guitar and the mic and he continued playing and singing. Everyone was applauding, whilst I’m sure like me partly waiting for a big bald man to try and usher him down, and I’m sure the fans would have formed a human barricade, but surprisingly no one came to ‘tell him off’, all they did was shine a spot light on him so we could all see him even better. You could see his entire t-shirt was drenched in sweat. Every camera in the room was pointed towards him and so was every face; his band mates must have been jealous, which may explain why one of them stood on a small speaker, but you could only see him if you were on one side of the room. Whilst he was up there he played three songs, and then threw his guitar down to someone on the ground that caught it, and resumed to playing the last song.

The energy was very high in the room as we all reluctantly departed whilst occasionally turning our heads in case there was an extra surprise performance, because after that who knew what to expect. I was more eager to get home and off my aching soles, so I could reminisce over the day whilst munching on anything edible and listen to all my new found bands.