3/21/2023 0 Comments Lost masterpiece of pornography"Boys Don't Cry" is an obvious starting point, culled from the album of the same name, it showcases the band in its embryonic stage, still sounding like a lean, mechanical post-punk band. While picking up a copy of 2001's Greatest Hits could easily satiate a newbie, it's the way these songs are injected into albums to dip and dart across genre lines that makes them most effective. Playlist: "Plainsong" / "Pictures of You" / "A Forest" / "The Drowning Man" / "Trust" / "To Wish Impossible Things" / "Treasure" / "The Last Day of Summer" / "Lost" / "Underneath the Stars"įor a band that made its name on brooding compositions, The Cure has dashed off their fair share of gooey pop gems, too. While both The Cure and 4:13 Dream suffer from subpar production, songs like "Underneath the Stars" prove the band's later period still warrants exploration. "Lost" opens the band's self-titled 2004 album, and though it's got more of a driving chug than anything that came before it, the track builds to a cathartic release that's as off-putting and powerful as anything the band did in the 80s. While the pair of albums that followed are often seen as minor, they have moments that keep them from being totally disposable. "The Last Day of Summer" and the closing title track both warrant their length, and even if the 11-minute "Watching Me Fall" sees Smith's affection for My Bloody Valentine's Loveless taking root in his own music. Considered the final act in "The Trilogy," alongside Disintegration and 1982's Pornography, the record may not fully measure up to those staggering heights but when it works, it shows that Smith is still capable of making good on his ambition. "Treasure" offers perhaps the shortest version of The Cure's esotericism, and it's a sound the band would return to fully with 2000's Bloodflowers. Though 1996's Wild Mood Swings is often seen as the first failure after a decade of highs, it still has songs that are worth digging for. It's why, on 1992's Wish, they'd spend half the record working in this mode, turning in glacially slow epics like "Trust" and "To Wish Impossible Things," only to buck expectations by releasing their bubbliest concoctions to date. By the time of Disintegration, they'd have perfected this sound and have made it a commercially viable pursuit. With songs like "A Forest" and "The Drowning Man" in tow, the band was able to position themselves as a leader in the quickly evolving goth scene while still retaining a post-punk snarl. You can see the band first playing with this form in the early 80s, with Seventeen Seconds and Faith offering more compact, post-punk versions of the band's all-consuming sound. And when Smith's vocals enter the fold, with the iconic opening line "I've been looking so long at these pictures of you / That I almost believe that they're real," it speaks to the band's ability to work in an esoteric mode and unleash a memorable hook when you least expect it. ![]() But it's in that space that The Cure showcases their power, taking a bleak color palette and imbuing it with soft flashes of light. Like much of Disintegration, "Pictures of You" could just as easily have been an instrumental, and for the first two minutes, it's exactly that. ![]() Hell, it even uses wind chimes effectively. No song in the band's arsenal highlights their ability to marry sprawling ambiance with gentle pop hooks better than "Pictures of You." Built on Simon Gallup's shimmering bassline and a simple drum groove, the song pushes forward slowly, allowing swells of synth to add to the song's desolate aura. So how does one get into The Cure, a band who has a catalog that's not just vast, but full of worthwhile material? And how does one make sense of a discography that includes everything from goth to pop and post-punk to psych? The only way to understand The Cure is to embrace the twists and turns of their discography, knowing that if one part of their sound doesn't appeal to you, there's another half-dozen that may. Though his art may skew toward the self-serious-and the fact he resembles a goth grandma doesn't help-there's more to The Cure than what a cursory glance would reveal. Though it should be obvious from the existence of songs like "Friday I'm in Love," "The Lovecats," or "Doing the Unstuck," there's a joyful giddiness undercutting much of frontman Robert Smith's work. On the surface, a Cure record may come across like a wall-to-wall mope fest, and while there's truth in that, it's not the totality of the band's being. A hidden challenge when getting into The Cure is denouncing the stereotypes that have long followed the band.
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