I was thinking about how to do this one for a bit, how should I structure it and what is the intent. I want to talk about my favourite band and why they are, I want to mention some memories I have associated with their music and I want to give my general opinions on their main releases. I don’t think I’m going to be trying to encourage or push people to listen to them, you probably have already and they have a following that’s been growing since the 70s so they aren’t having any difficulty filling entire arenas. Anyway what’s one blog that has an audience of a few people gonna do to help. I think if someone reads this and does start listening to them though, that would be nice. I was first thinking of going chronologically through my own experience with the band, but I’ve decided it will be easier to keep this focused if instead I go through their major studio releases and just jump back and forth in time when talking about me. So, I’ll talk about their 13 studio albums, the Japanese Whispers compilation, and maybe some of the other standalone singles. I don’t know how this will turn out, I never really talk about music because I don’t know much about it. I listen to a lot but as I’ve mentioned before I’m not a musically inclined person. I’ve never studied theory and know nothing about it, I’m not a very creative person myself and never wanted to make music. I’ll try and talk about the sounds and what they were doing without appearing to be a total idiot but who knows how I’ll do. I won’t mention or talk about lyrics too much either, if it’s not obvious already I get pretty bad imposter syndrome so I’m hesitant to say this but I generally disregard lyrics. I mean if the music/ sound itself isn’t able to capture the intended feeling the artist wants, lyrics aren’t going to help. They are only an extra layer on top, so I’ll pick up key phrases here and there after listening to a song many times and that often adds to the experience but most song lyrics just taken alone are not something worth paying attention to. There are some exceptions, some music where what’s being said is crucial but I don’t think that’s the norm.
Ok, so starting with their first studio album Three Imaginary Boys. I actually didn’t listen to this one until a while after becoming a fan. Although the last year I’ve been going through recommended bands/artists’ discographies chronologically, with The Cure my experience was much more organic. I avoided this album for a while, in fact it was the last one I listened to and listening to it today just as a refresher which I plan to do with all of them was only my fourth time with it. I knew a lot of the story behind it, I know that the band were really unhappy with it, so I kind of just had it as something to get around to for ages and wasn’t especially enthusiastic about. It’s the only album in which Robert Smith didn’t have full creative control, at least according to Wikipedia. Supposedly the record label decided the track listing and even chose the artwork on the cover. Robert Smith being the only constant member of the band from the school band of a different name that ended up becoming The Cure right up until today. There are a few other members who have been a huge part of the band, but there’s been a lot of leaving and coming back and that kind of thing over the years it seems. I might be completely wrong, maybe even the man himself would totally disagree but it seems like the band is ultimately his creative outlet. Anyway, I actually think this one is starting to grow on me. It’s all over the place, some songs sound nothing like anything that would later come from the band but in others you can certainly hear the early development of what they would go on to make. Tracks like Grinding Halt, which is actually a favourite of mine on this because the lyrics made me laugh out loud the first time hearing it, So What, Object and the intro 4:13 On A Saturday Night sound like punk rock tracks to me. They’re really upbeat and fun, which after this isn’t a word I’d use to describe The Cure until quite a while later down the line, but because the album is so inconsistent in tone the mood is never quite right for me. You have Subway Song which is this one off on the album with nothing else quite like it, Robert is basically whispering the lyrics as this creeping bassline just slowly builds, and towards the end you have some other instruments I don’t quite recognise. One is a harmonica I think, and the other a guitar maybe.. There’s also a Jimi Hendrix cover on here, the only song on a Cure album with a vocalist other than Robert I believe. Fire In Cairo and the title track are the songs that are clearly the most similar to their later stuff, other than the vocal delivery on Fire neither would seem out of place on Seventeen Seconds or Faith in my opinion. Three Imaginary Boys is the best thing on here easily, I said I’ve only listened to this thing in full a few times but this one track I’ve listened to way more. The thing as a whole is a complete mess, it feels like the record label just threw shit at the wall and were waiting to see what would stick. There were also two singles which were recorded in the same sessions as the stuff on the album but released separately, Killing An Arab and Boys Don’t Cry. The second one, as if you haven’t heard of it, was what they titled the US release of the album. The US release did include both singles along with some other songs and a different track order, but doesn’t have that Jimi Hendrix cover for some reason. I haven’t listened to it, but I’ve heard the other songs on there. If you are thinking of listening to this band and haven’t already, it’s probably best to start somewhere else.
Seventeen Seconds might be my favourite Cure album, my opinion on that changes a lot because there are so many great ones but it’s just so perfectly moody right the way through. You can tell right away from the 2 minute instrumental opener that this is a way more thought out and consistent record. It’s the first real Cure album in a way, and the first in the trilogy of “gothic” albums that the band really became known for. The Cure are still considered a goth band today by many, even though this was just one period in a career going for four decades now. The last release was in 2008 admittedly, but Robert Smith is apparently planning on releasing a new record next year on the 40th anniversary of Three Imaginary Boys. Anyway, this album in particular is really unique in my opinion. It’s so stripped back and empty sounding, it’s like one of those days when the sky is grey and you have no motivation to do anything somehow captured in sound. I don’t think there’s a single track on here I’m not happy to hear again, and I’ve listened to this album a lot at this point. It’s like if you were to take all my feelings of disinterest and boredom and turn it into music. It’s like an autumn or winter afternoon, stuck at home just staring at the ceiling or out at the sky wondering if it’s gonna be like this forever. When I describe it like this it sounds like if anything something you’d want to avoid, but yet I find myself coming back to this album probably more than any other from them. I think it’s helpful, especially when you’re actually having one of those days, in that you feel less alone. If someone so intimately understood this state of being that were able to capture it in music form, make something positive with those feelings, maybe it’s not so bad after all. After the intro you have Play For Today, which is the fastest track on here. If the album is meant to be one of those days I described, then this track is the very brief burst of energy your brain sends out to try and force you to get moving that you never act on. It’s probably the only song on here that might get someone dancing around their room a bit, but somehow all throughout there’s still this gloomy undertone. Like you know it’s coming to an end, and the way it fades out is like accepting the day as over before it could even get started. There’s something in Robert’s vocal delivery on here and all the songs that feel like he almost resents being there, I love it. In Your House is probably the song that captures the essence of this album best, either that or At Night. Although like I said the album is pretty consistent in tone so they all go very well together. The final song and title track hints at what’s coming next, up until this point there’s a very detached vibe like someone who’s given up, but this track feels much more like something from the next album Faith. It’s very similar, but more engaged and there’s more going on. I’ve heard this album described as stripped back, minimalist and sparse, but here we start to see some emotion. There’s more going on, the guitar sounds more present and at the forefront and Robert’s vocals have a sadness that wasn’t there until this point.
This album also has the song A Forest, which was the first song from The Cure I ever heard. It’s a funny story actually, I’ve mentioned before that I like a lot of Varg’s music (Burzum) and it was a video on his youtube channel with the same title that mentioned this song and had it playing that was my introduction to the band. I’m not a Varg fanboy or anything, I don’t really watch his channel anymore and he says a lot of ridiculous shit but there was a short period of time where I was watching his stuff a lot. I think that particular video is actually quite good though. The song really is fantastic too, it’s so atmospheric especially if you listen to it late at night as it’s dark out. To get to work I have to walk through this small park which even on a hot summer day stays pretty empty. Now usually they lock the gates as it gets dark but sometimes the owner or warden or whatever leaves it a little later. The first time walking home from work I saw it left open was late last winter, so it was completely dark out and there is only one streetlamp in the entire park so much of the walk through is lit only by the buildings in the distance and the small lights from the train tracks which run nearby. I remember debating if I should even go in that night, it was genuinely spooky and I had actually been mugged in the same park when I was far younger (around 12 or 13) but I went for it and I’m really glad I did. I remember the whole thing, I remember walking through the entrance and putting the song on without needing a second to think about it. It just made sense to me, it was perfect. It’s a short walk through the park, in fact it matched up almost perfectly with the song because as it was coming to an end I could see the street near where I live come into view. That walk though man it was exhilarating, the cold wind blowing on my face and being hardly able to make out the shapes of bushes and trees. I used to have nightmares of being stuck in this park as a kid, and here I was with my arms wide open totally fearless and at peace while this beautiful song played all around me. Honestly one of my favourite memories of the last year, I’ve done the same walk a few times since when I’ve been able to and as nice as it always is that first time is particularly special. In large part because fear of the dark and monsters etc. was such a huge part of my childhood, I was a cowardly little kid, so this was like conquering all of that. The song will always bring back that memory I think. Which quite fittingly is exactly what Varg’s video on the subject is about, how music and memory are so tied to one another.
Next release after Seventeen Seconds was Faith, the second in their gothic/ gloomy trio of records that defined the band for a lot of people. Last time the sound was disinterested and melancholic but now there was a true sense of despair. Apparently between the two every member of the band of that period had a family member die. They were also first starting to have some real success, and this alienated the very early fans from their local pubs and bars who perhaps felt like they were being left behind when they stopped performing at these small places. There was more going on, it was clearly a very difficult time, but you can find that somewhere else if you’re interested. It’s easy to find all the information you could ever need about this band. Fights between band members, fights with audiences, alcohol and drug abuse, etc. The album slowly builds itself up in the first half, starting with the first track which feels like a direct continuation from the end of Seventeen Seconds. It doesn’t have that aimlessness that was there before though, what Robert is saying and the way he’s doing so clearly show that. “I stand… and hear my voice cry out, a wordless scream at ancient power”, always sticks out to me even though I’m not one to try and pay attention to lyrics. I think the lyrics on here are quite good at adding to the mood and feel throughout though, on the next song Primary there’s another great example “the further we go, and older we grow, the more we know, the less we show”. To me that must be about losing the innocence of childhood, a theme which seems to come across again and again on here. If Seventeen Seconds was a despondent teenager stuck indoors wasting time, Faith is an early 20-something trying to tell that kid if only you knew what was to come.
The next couple songs further add to this building feeling, and after that is The Funeral Party. Inspired by the deaths of his grandparents, but more broadly about death in general, this is the heart of the album in my eyes. I don’t have a particularly special memory associated with this song like I do with A Forest and some others, but I do quite vividly remember the first time hearing it. It was another time my dad had left for one of his trips, like the one he just got back from recently. I don’t know if I already said this but he goes away two or three times a year on these trips and I have the place alone. It’s kind of an unofficial agreement we have. Anyway he was away and I’d just started really getting into the band seriously. I had only listened to Disintegration and Seventeen Seconds in full at this point plus a load of individual songs from all over their career. I can recall that building feeling as the record kept going, I was also still getting over a hangover from the night before, a night I’ll probably mention a little later actually. I remember lying down on the rug in the middle of the room staring at the ceiling and feeling totally hopeless, this was almost exactly two years ago now. I had dropped out of education again just before that summer and then spent the summer itself hidden away in my room becoming more and more isolated and getting radicalised by internet Nazis. That friend, the one who I’ve mentioned before and one of my only two real friends by this time hadn’t bothered to get in contact with me once that summer (although that night before we’d hung out) and now it was over my dad was insisting I go to the jobcentre and try to find work. I was standing on the cusp of adulthood and this album captured that feeling perfectly. Then this song starts, and as despairing and miserable as it is it’s truly a beautiful piece of music. After I’d finished the album through, I went back and re-listened to this and one of the other songs from the second half The Drowning Man over and over for hours. The album ends with the title track Faith, and it’s a slip back into a more reserved melancholy after the very cathartic and powerful three tracks preceding, funeral, Doubt and drowning man. It sounds like someone giving up, just lying down to die. Robert says this song encapsulates this period of his life better than anything else. “Nothing left but faith” he moans off in the distance somewhere. The relationship between the band members was deteriorating, their original fans were bitter and unhappy with them, of course the deaths of those close to him, it must have been completely overwhelming losing everything all at once.
The big one, one of the two Cure albums almost always chosen as their best work, Pornography is a fucking amazing album. It’s not something you can put on as background music, it’s not something I suggest having on regular rotation if for no other reason than that it should be saved for certain occasions, but it’s truly the most fitting way to cap off this period in the band’s career. It’s just so completely overwhelming, it’s an emotional tornado that just blows through everything. There is very little else like it I’ve heard before, every listen it consumes me all over again. The first time I listened to this album in full was the same day I first listened to Faith actually, it was later in the evening and I’d been lying around feeling like shit and listening to stuff from that over and over for hours when it began to get dark out. So I got up, forced myself to eat something and try and clear my head. Then after some time without any background noise I decided to put the record on. Immediately it hits you, the thudding sound like you’re in a hallway missing out on a party in one of the rooms for a few seconds and then out of nowhere the guitar is all over the place spiralling around in your head. Robert’s voice then bursts through, “it doesn’t matter if we all die” and there’s this aggression which you’ve never heard before on any Cure song. Most of the lyrics I’ve been able to pick up on this whole album are pretty similar. Phrases and imagery that seem to not mean anything, just bitterness and hate spat out at you. Then to follow up is A Short Term Affect which begins with this drumbeat that just beats on your brain throughout the song. Robert’s vocals are distorted at times, so it sounds like ghosts or demons mirroring when he sings. The heavy pounding drums are a feature all over this album, the third song The Hanging Garden being another great example. “Cover my face as the animals die” you hear screamed at almost like a plea to the heavens. Siamese Twins is the fourth song, and finally the initial anxiety attack that is the first part of the album dies down a little. This track is no less emotionally exhausting, but the pace has slowed down quite significantly.
This song is another one attached to a rather significant memory, I mentioned the night before listening to this album in full I had that friend visit me. Well that was the first time I heard this song, and it was quite a weird evening. This is the friend who I almost owe my entire personality to, I know that might sound hyperbolic and by now I’m a completely different person than when we were really true friends but I really mean it. I’ve gone into it in way more detail already, but I feel like he pulled me out of one of those pods in the matrix of something. I just don’t remember feeling like a real person before him, I think I was actually capable of smalltalk back then. After we finished school (here that’s at 15/ 16 years old) and had to go to do our A-levels we very suddenly went from being practically inseparable to hardly talking. He decided to go and live the life he’d been desperate to for years and I was going through what was probably the worst year of my life, and finding time to meet and hang out kind of wasn’t a priority for either of us. So we met very occasionally, me him and one other third friend who we also spent a lot of time with towards the end of secondary school would meet up at mine and get blackout drunk when my dad went on his trips away but other than that we never spoke. That other guy I’ve actually become far closer with since we finished school, we still speak often more than once a week. So it’s time again, my dad is away and I think it’s time to get the two of them together and we’ll do our usual thing. Well slightly different, this time one of us had the bright idea to bake pot brownies. Long story short we ruined it all by burning the weed, wasted quite a lot of money and were feeling not great. Then the other friend had to leave as it started getting later and he had work the next day, so it was just me and my once best friend and despite already blowing like £50 on weed we went and bought a load of cheap cider and got to reminiscing about how things were before. We spoke about how simple things were when we were 14, that period of time I would describe as the happiest I’ve ever been even despite my mother dying (although in a sense I didn’t really accept it until much later down the line), and how much easier it was. It was honestly what I needed at that time more than anything, this evening really kept me going because for so long I’d felt like only I had fond memories of that period. To hear him talk about it in just the same way, like he had this same view of it as being before all the bullshit allowed me to get over the feelings of betrayal and abandonment I had. The evening itself was unremarkable, we got a little drunk and watched a few episodes of this old Japanese tv show from the 70s “The Water Margin” which my dad has from when he was a kid. It’s kind of goofy, the dubbing is pretty bad. I’ve watched it a couple times through already with my dad, so I have fond memories associated with it already and the old place my dad lived at before moving in with me. At one point though, not long before he left, we got talking about the music we’d been listening to since losing contact and I mentioned I’d really been getting into The Cure lately. So he decided to play this song, Siamese Twins, which I hadn’t heard yet. So now whenever I hear the song I can’t help but think back to that night, that night saved that friendship. Since then the three of us have been in more regular contact than any point since finishing school together. I even had my first psychedelic experience (kinda, the dealer gave us this very mild chemical 2-cb and claimed it was synthetic shrooms, I’m looking into growing myself from spores now) with them this summer on a camping trip. It’s starting to feel like, even though we’ll never have the relationship we had for that roughly two year period I finally have my friend back.
I should finish talking about the rest of the album though, The Figurehead is another amazing song (they all are, this whole album is as close to perfect for me as can be), “sharp and open leave me alone, I’m sleeping less every night” continues the theme of someone’s failing sanity. I’ve heard that this song, as part of a supposed greater story being told over the entire album, is about a man going mad and dreaming of or possibly actually killing a prostitute. It would make sense that it follows immediately after Siamese Twins which I’m pretty sure is about someone losing their virginity to a prostitute and a deep sense of regret/ anger/ conflict following the act. After that is A Strange Day, which I’d been enjoying a lot for a while before listening to it in context. Honestly it’s almost like a different song when you hear it both ways, the first few times I heard it as a standalone song I thought it had a hopefulness to it. A sense of overcoming great difficulty, of rising above it. Then hearing it surrounded by all this pain and hate, and hearing about “going away on a strange day”, now it seems more like sinking deeper into hell than rising. I know I said I don’t usually pay attention to lyrics, but on Pornography I think they’re done so well I can’t help but pay attention. The scattershot nature, how the imagery in them is just so brilliantly fitting for the music. Coming up to the end now, Cold follows the trend of the album with the beating drums getting it started. “A shallow grave, a monument to a ruined age” the scope here is suddenly so much greater than it has been so far since the opener. Not just in what is being sung about either, the music itself on this track sounds so much more majestic and grand. Before you had the image of a crazed insomniac, losing his mind in a dilapidated flat or wandering the streets at night with the other vagrants and degenerates. Now it’s like someone looking down on the world, and seeing the pain that was tormenting them has grown far larger than ever could have been predicted. All around is ruin and desolation, a broken world. Finally the title track Pornography gets started, and it takes it’s time slowly building. There’s over a minute of creepy whispering and a whining electronic noise. It’s like an old military radio or something, but no one’s there to respond on the other side. Then these drums start going, muffled at first and gradually building up in speed and power. The voices start to sound more like crowds of rioters or prisoners banging on their cages, and the electronic noise is more like an airhorn or something keeping them back or even a siren at a couple points. A few voices rise above the rest, but are still ultimately unintelligible and just as nasty sounding. It’s over three minutes until Robert’s voice appears, as if he’s down there with the swarming masses. Another one of the voices that manages to stand out, and the crowd does seem to become even more energised. There are sounds of twisting metal now too, or at least that’s how it always sounded to me. The drumbeat, more slow and steady than the others on this album, has been there in the background this whole time. Then right towards the end he yells out “I must fight this sickness… find a cure” and the radio voice returns, or the sound of news anchors or something like it “I MUST FIGHT THIS SICKNESS” louder this time, and then it all fades into black.
Honestly I think what makes these three “gothic” albums so special is how tonally consistent they are, each one has such a strong vibe that it sticks to right the way through. You can see the progression into the next with each as well, until the ultimate explosive end. I feel like together they tell a story of a slow descent into madness. With Seventeen Seconds of course having a strong sense of isolation/ being stranded in a bleak and empty universe. Faith a pretty miserable take on the usual coming of age theme, and Pornography a tale of self destruction. This ended up being way longer than I imagined, I thought I’d just have a short paragraph for each album and be done with the entire thing in a couple days. I’ve loved writing this though, even if it’s pretty terrible and you can tell I have no idea what I’m doing. Going through the albums again and really trying to listen in and describe how it sounds (to an amateur like me) was a lot of fun. The last two nights I’ve ended up writing way into the early morning without even noticing. I’ve probably deleted half on top of what I kept for the final upload. I think I’m going to have to do this thing in two or maybe three parts. So, hopefully you like it anyone who reads this. The next post will probably just be another journal entry/ me whining about things kind of deal, and maybe later next week when I have time off work again I’ll continue with part 2. Listen to The Cure man 😉
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 