During the past decade and a half, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Tim Kasher has served as the reeling ringmaster for the dark, wonderfully dysfunctional circus known as Cursive. A constantly fluctuating membership has resulted in Cursive’s fascinatingly malleable sound, from the Indie Rock gravity of 1997’s Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes to the denser and more conceptual Early Summer: Semantics of Song in 1998 to the string-driven Burst and Bloom and The Ugly Organ in the new millennium.   

It seems like in the past, Cincinnati had a reputation for being the kind of place you could move away from for a decade knowing that when you returned, the gas station, grocery store and drinking establishments would be there waiting for you, exactly as you left them.