Black Out

The Good Life is reportedly the product of 12 years worth of songwriting on the part of Cursive vocalist Tim Kasher, which should give you a pretty good indication of the project's intimacy, intensity, and scope. Apparently during those 12 years Kasher has endured a fair amount of pain, because there's an awful lot of it in his emotional songwriting and his laborious, unbeautiful, excruciatingly sincere voice. If you're looking for Cursive's conceptual emo, you won't find it here; Kasher tends more towards dark baroque pop, sometimes of the New Wave synth-driven '80s variety, sometimes of the strangled coffeehouse confessional variety. The music is acoustically oriented, but beautifully nuanced, full of odd sounds and electronics, which provide shadowy accents to the songs' tortured sentiments.