I’m a fan of Pedro the Lion, and so I was curious about David Bazan’s solo album, Curse Your Branches. It came out in 2009, and I grabbed a copy from Amazon.
Bazan’s album is a tough one. “It’s hard to be a decent human being,” he sings on the lead track, “Hard to Be.” OK, fine, no problem there, we can all relate. But then it sort of goes deeper into darkness, or, you might say, downhill. Not that dark isn’t a good thing–I’m all for it. But there are some hard, head-on-the-pavement truths his characters are facing in these songs that are pretty tough to hear.