Mama, I'm Swollen.......

for my feature writing class we had to do an album review...

Who am I? What have I become? Or rather more importantly: Who are we? What have we become? Questions like this can torment a man, wring him dry of all his worth. But there are no answers. Some may shruggingly suggest that this is just the way life has panned out. One can choose to accept, refuse or maintain their ignorance, the foremost seemingly being the wisest of choices. But then there are those rare individuals who seek to question, criticize and hopefully, perhaps even quite forcibly, open some pining eyes to this unsettling nature of our reality (or reality of our nature?).
This is the path the Omaha-based band, Cursive, willed to wander (or stagger) desperately down with their newest project, Mama, I’m Swollen.
While consistently being disappointed by our generation’s stream of popular music, the meaningless trash regurgitated from incompetent ‘hot new artists’, and then all of a sudden hearing Cursive’s lead singer, Tim Kasher, sing was like hearing the voice of a fallen angel unleashed for the first time.
To have song upon song and lyric after lyric grip onto one another with such raw ingenuity, exposing a reality so harsh and inadequate through the eyes of such an artist, is stunningly unexpected and beautifully heartbreaking.
The message the album struggles to project is this idea of devolving; devolving into simpler beings, thriving off our animal instincts. Lost in this complex and evil world, Kasher has lost his faith. His faith in god; faith in humanity; faith in himself, all his senses and instincts: everything. This spiraling outlook of life is written very bluntly, making it impossible for one to invent ambiguities in its meaning. These songs are songs of substance, no doubt.
Mama, I’m Swollen is the definition of confliction. Humanity sees things one way, when it is meant to be the other. It’s a deceitful game we are playing in which there are no winners; the game just self-destructs when the timer goes off:

Simplicity vs. Complexity: our corporate consumer society has transformed our lives into such an unfathomably complex system and is now impossible to imagine the back-peddle to our ancestry’s primitive lifestyle. To own material objects fed into desire was non-existent then and to this day remains unnecessary and unimportant, to an extent. It has been engrained in us to want and want and want regardless the outcome or who will fail in turn. This idea is expressed in a lyric from the song, Caveman: “the taller we become the more dollars we can grab from that highest branch and then step on your back given the chance…I’m no high society man”. This sense of greed in which we have faithfully adopted is imprisoning us from more sustainable aspects of life such as relationships and the experience of life.

Evolution and Devolution: “Let my instincts take the lead, don’t need no upward mobility” expresses so powerfully this notion that our human instincts were always enough to bring about prosperity and great developments. This maintenance and evolvement of upward motion within the class or society has lead to a lustful greed and a deadening desire for more and more money and material; all things we are righteously granted, though it is excess that is our problem. There is no moderation.

Pure vs. Evil: There is a saddening extinction in effect for those who exercise purity of heart. The creators and advocates of evil have become unbearably overpopulated. In the song, Mama, I’m Satan, there is a pinching lyric which describes this point: the darkness of mankind stirs in us all. A little earlier he sings, “The world was built on an ego, it was built on slaves, it was built on a tickle between our legs” all things considered evil or unlawful. He preaches this notion that there never was a soul truly pure of heart and so creates an unstoppable evil.

Education vs. Instinct: who is to say what we have learned thus far has been what we are supposed to know? One lyric on one hand says, “I want to unlearn what I’ve learned” and a bit before this he sings, “I want to let my instincts take the lead”. It is such an honest feeling that, to empathize with him seems only fair and just. Preserving this notion, he states, “and I wish we that we had never talked, our hips had said it all…it’s the only way to feel alive”. So sad and true how this holds to today’s society. We have become so lost in the translations, lost within the tangles of our own words. It is through our hips and bodies and feelings that we come to feel alive again, even if for a short time. All else is seemingly useless.

With so many evils lurking quietly, the search for good becomes a tiresome, endless journey. It is difficult to sustain the positivity we are meant to hold for this world and what it has to offer. Hopefully, maybe, his lyrics have struck a few chords in another’s mind. His words hold a real sense of power. They hold onto a chance at change, an honest change. It’s not meant to be a battle, not meant to be a fight. One can change humanity; one can change society by first changing the mindset. And that’s all this artist’s simple song could ever ask for.