Category: Talking about art

Nothing lasts forever

Ok, I’m trying this for the second time. So I’ve just recently finished reading the book Travels In Nihilon, which I mentioned I was reading a while back and I should have been finished with a while back also but I’ve not been reading very much. Really just for about 15 minutes a day, I need to try and include reading more as part of a new restructured routine I think. Anyway, I said I might have something to say about it so here we are. It’s quite funny how I found out about the book actually, I searched my own blog title up on google to see what would come up one afternoon and there was another site/ blog with a similar title. I wouldn’t recommend it, it was just hipster trash but there was a post about the five books that most influenced the guy and this book was one of them. I don’t remember the others and while I’ve been able to find that blog again I can’t find the specific post about these books. Anyway from the brief description the book seemed quite interesting. It sounded like it would be worthwhile to give it a read given the kind of things that were on my mind at the time, so I found a copy on Amazon and ordered it.

Now “nihilism” is a tricky word, because my understanding of what it means seems to be quite different to the author Alan Sillitoe’s definition. From what I understand it’s essentially a lack of belief, not necessarily religious belief but belief in any kind of worldview that presents a greater meaning or purpose to you. I suppose it’d be more accurate to call that existential nihilism, but this is another great example of my concept of the cultural definition. What might be referred to in academic circles as existential nihilism, is just called nihilism more generally and even by those people as a shorthand. I’m not sure if this idea of mine is my own, or I’ve picked it up from somewhere else without realising. It certainly isn’t a wholly unique idea, and I’m not sure if the term “cultural definition” is the best thing to call it either. It’s funny too because the position is in a sense quite opposed to my usual outlook, I mean you could argue that it’s “democratic” in a way. It doesn’t have to be, I personally haven’t said that either the public consensus on a definition or the “official” definition of a word that would be in the oxford dictionary say is the more “true” version. All I will say is that it seems like most people would say so, after all given enough time the official definition will change or at the very least a second definition will be added to the dictionary.

I would say usually there is more complexity in these official/ older definitions of words and terms as a general rule, and as more and more people have become literate this simplification of language has sped up. Now obviously there are cases where both the cultural definition (or maybe I should call it, consensual definition? or functional definition?) is similarly nuanced and even more so than the older version. It’s not just standalone words even, look at the example that got me started on this tangent. Existential nihilism as an idea, has just become “nihilism” at least according to most people who you’d meet walking around on the street. There’s also moral nihilism, and political nihilism, etc. but those ideas are only covered by the new “nihilism” in so far as a symptom of this existential nihilism that many people feel is very common nowadays and is referred to simply as “nihilism”. Maybe I’m not explaining this very well, what I’m saying is these other nihilisms have all been tied in to one because of this simplification of language and this in turn limits our potential understanding of things. Now those other equally interesting and separate concepts are seen merely as different aspects or facets of the same one thing. Which is not even necessarily something I disagree with, in this particular instance in fact I would actually say I do agree with that to an extent, but the problem is that that’s not just another thing to consider it’s the only way of seeing things for most people, because of all these different ideas being shoved together under the word “nihilism”.

The thing is, the word “nihil” in latin from which the English word nihilism comes just means “nothing”, but we already have a word for that in English which is of course “nothing”. It seems to me there are two kinds of word, there are those that describe something completely material/ physical like a tree or a chair and translate easily, and words that describe things that are more abstract or dare I say metaphysical which of course are much more difficult to translate. Now obviously the word tree or chair is also an idea, the platonically ideal chair is whatever Charlemagne’s throne and a block of ice with a fur blanket on top that an eskimo sits on for supper have in common, and they both are ultimately a flawed but physical example of “chair”. The word exists to help make sense of the physical world, as opposed to a word like say (keeping on topic here) “nihilism” which may affect our behaviour in the material world but is not trying to describe something within it.

What I’m saying is, the word “nihilism” is not the English translation of the word “nihil” from latin. Perhaps when it was used as a component of these other terms it was closer to being so, take the concept of moral nihilism for example. To best explain moral nihilism (or at least what I think it is) I’ll actually go back to the example of the chair. So like a chair, all the real world examples may be flawed but share in common a certain “chair-ness”. Well a rather common view nowadays is moral relativism, which is similar in that according to this perspective there are certain different moral frameworks that exist but have some kind of universal “moral-ness” to them. Moral nihilism in comparison would deny that there is any such “moral-ness” at all. So you see how the evolution happens, or seems to have happened obviously, I’m not an etymologist I’m just an uneducated shut in so don’t take my word for it but you can see how it might have gone. “X nihilism” is generally a rejection of whatever “X-ness” people suggest there is. So the word is more similarly used to the latin “nihil”, “X nothingness” or “nothing X” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Existential nihilism isn’t really something that you can just sum up in a few sentences, but I suppose the general idea isn’t too difficult to understand, it’s in the name after all. Essentially, the idea is that existence has no meaning or anything at all really. We just are, inexplicably, and for no good reason at all really. How strange it is to be anything at all, as Jeff Magnum put it. Now of course, seeing as existence kind of covers.. well everything. It kind of makes sense how this one idea in a way consumed all the others. It’s understandable why people might believe that falling prey to this existential nihilism might lead someone to be distrustful of any kind of authoritative worldview at all. This is why, I think that all of these have come to simply exist together under the umbrella word “nihilism”.

Now, a lot of people (often reactionaries or religious types) who are scared of nihilism taking hold in the public consciousness or even lamenting the fact that it already has in their eyes, will go on to suggest what they think will be the result of it. Generally, you get images of a violent and chaotic world. A place where the people are ruled by fleeting fancies, and immediate urges. Naturally any kind of order or regimentation falls apart, and the idea of working towards a long term goal is an impossible one. Certainly if there’s not a very real and material long term reward for holding off on fully pursuing immediate hedonistic desires. I’ll take the example of this large football stadium I live near to. Now I’ve lived near it for most of my life, close to a decade and a half, and to this day when walking past it it still feels impressive. I mean you have to be there in person to get what I mean, it’s more than just a big building it feels fucking imperial. Especially at night and when it’s all lit up. Whether there’s crowds of people on a game day swarming around it and revealed by it’s looming presence for the tiny creatures they are or on a normal evening when you can really feel almost invincible up on the plateau the thing is built on knowing you’re in a city with millions of people and yet all alone in this huge open expanse.

See the builders who worked on that, a great deal of them probably support a different team or maybe are even foreign workers who don’t care about the sport at all. That’s fine, I’ve never cared about football either, but my point is that these football stadiums are the great monuments of our time. Now it’s certainly preferable to live in a civilisation with the wealth to build big majestic buildings like this at least, but it’s still lamentable that they are no longer built for the higher reasons the great wonders of the past were. Yes, slaves and hired workers were required to build such structures (The Great Pyramid of Giza, The Hagia Sophia, The Taj Mahal, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, and even The Empire State Building) in the past but the difference is that these structures were monuments to the very civilisation that birthed them. The people who own these stadiums today are foreign oligarchs who care nothing for the nation that hosts the thing, or even for the actual game of football in many cases, just like a lot of the builders as I said earlier.

These stadiums (and of course it doesn’t have to be football, in the US it might be baseball or that weird version of rugby where they wear armour, Canada it might be hockey, etc.) are what we might call private sector works. Now of course the private/ public sector dichotomy is a modern idea, and you can’t directly apply it to the past but you can in some sense describe a lot of these older buildings as “public sector” works. I mean sure often emperors and kings funded these projects themselves, but their wealth and the government treasury were often the same thing. Can you even imagine a typical western democratic government decreeing any kind of monument or great building be built today? Of course not, yet people do want that, why is the Trump wall such a huge selling point after all? You can’t have multi generational projects and term limits at the same time. That’s how you really know that nihilism has taken root, when your society has no self confidence, no desire or will to project itself onto the world. When you believe there’s nothing special about your culture to celebrate (with monuments for example), no long term vision, but just a demoralising and ugly day to day pragmatism.

Which finally brings me back to what I was trying to say right at the start, and onto the actual book. Like I said, the author’s definition of nihilism really doesn’t seem to be accurate at all. My understanding of the word is what I have gone through already, basically what would more accurately be called existential nihilism. The author’s definition seems to be describing the symptoms, or more accurately what some people think might be the symptoms. It’s like someone describing a fever as malaria, when you can have a fever just from a bad cold or a bunch of other illnesses. “Nihilism” as it is used in this book really could be substituted instead with the word “chaos”, at least that’s certainly how it seems at first glance. Here’s the premise of the novel. There is this country/ state which is called Nihilon and the government of Nihilon is intent on pursuing “””nihilism””” as a policy. The blurb describes Nihilon as “a little known country, whose life and economy are based on nihilistic principles”. Now how this actually plays out in the book is that the government does all it can to create as much chaos and contradiction as possible in every regard, so there are laws demanding that you never be caught driving sober, and manual labour is seen as women’s work, and so forth.

Now going back to what I was talking about earlier, in a rather ironic way not only is the definition wrong but the use of this wrong definition makes the fictional Nihilon in one sense quite the opposite of a nihilistic nation. The policy of perfectly regimented chaos (as it’s literally referred to at one point in the novel) requires far more self confidence on the part of the ruling elite, represented by the shadowy President Nil, than any of the great and powerful empires of old and even the pathological and idealistic states of the 20th century. Think Best Korea, The Soviet Union or The Third Reich, and Nihilon is just as authoritarian if not more so than any of those places. The level of oversight required to enforce this state of chaos is immense, people’s lives are micromanaged in every way.

Now the book is set a good two decades after this regime has held control, and so naturally people have begun to adapt to the mayhem. The average citizen of Nihilon by the time our characters arrive is a bipolar petty scam artist with a sociopathic disregard for human life. There’s one passage in particular that really illustrates the level of control the government has. One of the characters is on an airplane and chatting to the guy next to him as they’re arriving in Nihilon, so before they even arrive but the airline is owned by the government I believe, and at one point after the stranger says something he shouldn’t a voice barks out at him through a speaker on the back of the chair in front of them telling him to stop. It’s claimed that the voice is President Nil himself, although no one actually knows what he looks like, regardless I think that illustrates the situation quite well. It reminds me of the telescreens from 1984. So throughout my time reading the book this was kind of on the back of my mind, the government isn’t pursuing a policy of nihilism, that’s a contradiction in terms. Not only that, but this is one of the most ideologically single minded regimes imaginable if anything.

It’s not until reflecting after I was finished that I think I really understood what the author was truly trying to express. See the plot of the book is that the main characters are sent to this mysterious country to write a tourist guide for the place, but while there a civil war breaks out between the government and the “forces of law and order”, a rival faction who claim they want to restore those very things. The main plot culminates in this assault by the forces of law and order on a facility in the mountains from where the government of Nihilon planned to send a rocket ship into space with two “lovers” in order to broadcast to the world the first ever example of sex in space. It’s a huge symbolic thing, again reinforcing how much vision this government has, and they’re unable to stop it in time. Nevertheless the forces of law and order still manage to take control, President Nil flees and the daughter of the old president of Damascony (the name of the region before it became Nihilon, also following a civil war a few decades earlier) is made queen.

Now President Nil himself appears only twice in the story, or three times if that voice in the airplane really is him. The first time is already quite a way towards the end, just before the assault on the compound in the mountains, and it is revealed that the whole thing has in fact been orchestrated by him. That’s the twist of the story, or one of them anyway. It’s already revealed earlier on that the guidebook mission was a cover, and that the main characters were unwittingly set up to play a role in the rebellion, but it’s not until this scene right near the end that President Nil is revealed as the actual person behind it. So this is shown to the reader, but the characters themselves don’t meet the man until the very end, the last couple of pages of the book. This scene is as the characters are leaving once and for all.

See after the new regime settles in it quickly becomes apparent that nothing has actually changed, immediately there are a bunch of new equally zany and inane laws passed as the ones from before only this time in the name of honesty and virtue or some similar expression. It really doesn’t come as much surprise, as during the earlier parts of the book it’s made clear that the people fighting for “law and order” and the nihilonian forces are basically indistinguishable. They’re the same feckless idiots and self serving swindlers as every single person in this god forsaken country. The very attack on the compound is emblematic of this, a completely insane event with legions of sportscars smashing against the walls and the queen being carried into battle in a medieval style litter, etc. It slowly becomes clear that this is just a big game to these people, like football teams the one they ended up supporting was arbitrary.

See then it starts to become clear, and as the characters are trying to get the hell out of this now clearly irredeemable shithole they have one last encounter before getting on the boat home. As they are just about to leave, there are explosions in the crowd and the characters dash into the boat for safety. All except one, Benjamin Smith, who is probably the most developed of all the characters in the book and the one with the most ties to Nihilon having fought in the first civil war when the place was still known as Damascony. He sees the man in the crowd, who we the reader know to be President Nil and as he goes to kill him President Nil smiles. Here’s a quote from this last passage of the novel, just as the explosions start to go off. “It was like a volcano erupting, a spectacle which showed Benjamin – though only for a moment – that Nihilon was a country for which nothing could be done, a part of the world that could no more be covered by  guidebook than a jungle could”.

You see, President Nil smiled because it was in this moment that he knew he had achieved his goal at last, and he could die knowing that. He knew that because he saw the realisation in Benjamin’s eyes, that Nihilon had now actually become nihilistic in the true sense. I don’t mean that it had become chaotic, as I thought at first when reading the book the author meant by that word, I mean actually nihilistic. Remember what I said earlier about how some say a similarly orderless and nonsensical civilisation may be a result of a society that falls prey to nihilistic thinking, well President Nil seems to have almost done the reverse. By artificially creating such a world, he’s selected for the people who of course would thrive in it. The civil war was his big gambit, to see if all his hard work had paid off, and he was right. His long term policy it turns out, truly was nihilism after all. The only question really, is why he had such a goal.

 

 

My favourite band: Part 3

It’s funny that only recently I was talking about dreams, because dreamlike is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Disintegration. It’s touted as this great return to the gothic gloom and doom of earlier Cure records, and it’s certainly more similar to those than the more poppy albums I talked about last time, but it’s quite a different experience to either. It’s more like a third direction, and the following records which sound very similar to me (especially Bloodflowers) further support this idea. Another thing I like so much about this band is that in most cases if asked what a specific album sounds like you can point to the art on the cover and say “well it kinda sounds like that”, and Disintegration is a perfect example of this. Sure the general goal seems to be to capture the feeling of the record visually with most album art, but in my opinion it’s not usually successful. It all makes sense even if everything seemingly doesn’t fit, just like in a dream. The colour palette as well is so perfectly suited, the deep blues and greens further draw you in to this spectral realm. Listening to this album is like taking a lonely evening walk through a haunted fairy tale forest, the navy blue shallow pools reflecting the gradually darkening sky above you, and the details on the leaves becoming harder and harder to see as night slowly falls. It’s just undeniable that Robert Smith (and yes it really is in this case mostly just Robert, this album was initially planned as a completely solo project) makes his best stuff while taking lots of drugs. In particular, psychedelics like LSD, which his return to regular use of in part inspired him to create Disintegration. I think this view of Disintegration as a concept album of sorts, telling the story of a pensive evening stroll through the woods just really adds something to the experience. There’s certainly a common theme, this anxiety over reaching the age of 30 and not having a real legacy to leave behind which is partly what makes this album while similarly gloomy like the early gothic trio feel more mature, and it gives this album more wide appeal than those also. After all this concern is a natural part of the human condition, think of the famous (and probably quite embellished) story of Julius Caesar weeping in front of a statue of Alexander the Great.

The album starts with a mostly instrumental intro, with only some echoing and reverberating vocals coming in towards the end. There’s a good ten seconds of dead silence to start with and then slowly a twinkling sound can be heard, at first so muted you might not hear it unless the volume is up fairly high (which it should be, the original copies came with a little note specifying that the record was meant to be played loudly), then after gradually getting closer to you it explodes. The effect is like fireworks in audio, it’s beautiful and you just want to focus on it and ignore whatever else is going on. There’s the occasional heavy drum being beaten in the distance somewhere, not like a consistent drumbeat throughout instead it’s quite sporadic. After a couple minutes the vocals come in, it always seemed to me like someone going over a past conversation in their head. With the “you said” being repeated over and over and there’s also the echo effect adding to that. Then the singing comes to a stop and the guitar (I think it’s a guitar) which had been there most of the track but not prominent becomes the focus as the song closes out. After that is Pictures Of You which I don’t like so much, maybe because I find it harder to relate to the things he sings about on here but then again I really like Lovesong which is much more explicitly a song about romantic relationships. Anyway it’s not really the lyrical content that is the issue here, in fact when listening to this album with my friends last spring this is the one that we were all singing along to. Maybe that’s it actually, this album is kind of meant to be listened to alone I think I even remember reading an interview where Robert himself said that, but this song is clearly better enjoyed in good company. So it’s a little out of place, although it still has a very similar sound to the rest of the album. The twinkling chimes, the specific kind of effect he gets with his guitar, etc. Third in the tracklist is Closedown, which is a kind of conflicted song in my opinion. The words are not very cheery at all, describing the state of being Robert was in while recording the album. Sleep deprived and back to regular drug and presumably alcohol use, it’s not too different from the environment which led to Pornography although this time more deliberate and controlled. Speaking of Pornography, the way the words are actually sung also reminds me of some of the songs on there quite a bit. The rest of the music though is quite uplifting, it sounds almost like something from The Lion King at first before the guitar comes in. Lovesong is exactly what the title suggests, if it wasn’t for that trademark undertone of melancholy which can completely change your interpretation of the lyrics it would feel totally out of place on the album. I’ve heard a couple of covers of it and they demonstrate this perfectly.

Other than Plainsong though up until this point the album is at it’s weakest, the last two thirds are the real experience. Last Dance is what starts off this run, and it’s so integral to my experiences with this album (especially the first time hearing it, which was the first time listening to a Cure album in full) that I was really surprised to find out that on the original releases it wasn’t even included and only later in CD copies was it put in. Another drawn out and minimalist intro starts this off, before the song really kicks into gear and you realise the huge scope. It sounds like it’s all around you, like you’ve floated up into the stars and there’s so much empty space between all the different parts. It’s very reminiscent of the last section of Pornography which starts with the song Cold and very cleverly this song includes a hidden line from that song whispered softly “your name like ice, into my heart”, which I never noticed myself while listening but read about online. Lullaby is next and is one of my favourite songs from the band and just one of my favourite songs generally speaking. I don’t think I really need to go into detail talking about the music, overanalysing might have a negative effect if anything. It’s just so… pleasant. I can’t really explain why, it just has this calming effect on me so I suppose it’s appropriately titled. The lyrics talk about this “spiderman” creature, a half man half spider which ate little children and was a regular feature in the bedtime stories of Robert’s uncle according to interviews. Fascination Street follows immediately after and completely changes things up, being much faster and energetic. The drums are much more prominent on this than the rest of the album, and these bell things like maybe cowbells are used as well I’m not sure exactly what they are but they work really well. It has a really triumphant feel to it, which carries on onto at least the intro of the next song Prayers For Rain.

Things slow down again here, and the lyrics are the most depressive and gloomy on the entire record “I suffocate I breathe in dirt and nowhere shines”, but the drumbeat throughout feels like a lifeline of sanity that will allow you to come out on top. The hopelessness of Pornography is not really present on this album, the next song The Same Deep Water As You is the only time it slightly approaches those depths of despair. I’m not really talking about the lyrics here either, a lot of people have read into and wrote their ideas about the lyrics on this and I’d only do a worse job so I won’t bother. The music itself though, the way it drags on for almost ten minutes and captures this feeling of total emptiness reminds me of Faith (the song and the whole album) a great deal. The “prayers” were answered as well it seems, as there’s this rainy/ stormy effect on this track so it sounds like you’re sitting in a small wooden cabin or under a thicket of tress with the drops hitting something above you. Then a smashing sound, like a window being broken and this upbeat drumbeat hits. The title track is actually surprisingly cheery, although after the last song most songs would seem to be. The guitar offsets this a little with a more melancholic melody, leading to that trademark undertone I mentioned earlier. It’s something they’d been doing since the Japanese Whispers era, but was perfected on this album. Honestly this album is where they perfected everything they’d been developing and doing, it is the first album with the famous Cure “sound” and everything after while enjoyable mostly feels derivative or when they do try to experiment it fails. It’s the band’s peak, and this song is the best representation of the album as a whole so it feels appropriate as the title track. It’s not the end though, Homesick and Untitled are what end off the record. Another two long drawn out songs that go for the gloomy vibe, but don’t quite do it as well as The Same Deep Water As You in my opinion. If it’s not obvious I love this album, I don’t really have any specific memories tied to it other than it being my first Cure album and getting my friends to listen to it in full also for the first time for both of them last spring. I have maybe listened to it half a hundred times and still keep going back.

Next came Wish, and as I just mentioned it does sound very much like Disintegration. It’s just missing the soul of that record though, Robert Smith managed to forge the legacy he was so concerned he wouldn’t manage to do with that record and it’s like since then he’s been trying to recreate that. The song Trust is a perfect example, it seems to have all the components of the classic gloomy Cure songs but just doesn’t stick the landing for whatever reason. I can’t really explain it, it’s just an intuitive thing. On Wish he seems to not want to fully commit to this anyway though, so there are also tracks that feel more inspired by the stuff from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me which just makes the album feel tonally inconsistent. There are some tracks on here that are absolutely fantastic of course, both moody and cheery ones, but it feels more like a compilation of songs rather than a proper record with a distinct identity. The opener, Open (haha), has this great mechanical sound to it. From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea, Doing The Unstuck and the closing track End (haha) are the highlights here certainly. A whole album of stuff like these three would have been something special. It’s only really on these where the balance between Disintegration and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is actually handled well. The singles from this album I really do not like, other than Friday I’m In Love which is actually quite catchy. High and A Letter To Elise are the ones I really have a problem with, the sounds just all seem to be mushed together so you can’t really pick anything out, they don’t reward you paying closer attention. It’s like they were designed to be background noise while driving to work or walking around in the supermarket. Apart is another song which tries very hard to capture that Disintegration spirit, and does a much better job I will say. If it had been included on there it wouldn’t seem out of place I don’t think, as Trust would. It has the whispery vocals from some of the songs on there, and the eerie feeling to it that was all over Disintegration. In fact if this song and Pictures Of You swapped places it’d make more sense. To Wish Impossible Things is one I’m coming around to, the violin is really nice on it and an instrument quite rarely used by the band. In fact I’m warming up to the album more generally speaking, there’s definitely a few songs I doubt I’ll ever be able to enjoy but having to listen to it a few times for this entry and more closely too has given me more of an appreciation for it.

Wild Mood Swings which came after is certainly an attempt to go in a new direction, which is appreciated, but as I said from this point forward it’s mostly attempts to relive the glory days of Disintegration or failed experiments. This is one of the failed experiments, and not just in my view there seems to be a consensus that this is one of the worst Cure albums. A lot of people say it’s the absolute worst, and I think I might agree. It’s certainly fighting with Three Imaginary Boys for the bottom spot, I can’t decide for sure. It’s very similar to The Top in my opinion, both in the frenzied or even wacky vibe it goes for and the various influences from all over the world. The 13th sounds like there’s a mariachi band backing Robert, Gone! has these brass band style horns in the background, there’s an oriental sound at the very opening of the song Numb etc. However unlike that album which grew on me quite a bit after a few listens, a lot of the tracks on here still just sound abrasive and even grating. I had to go through it again for this of course, and I did kind of want to skip a couple. The second song Club America is one of the worst and a great example of what ruins this record, it has this awful electric guitar that’s way too loud and keeps schizophrenically switching to play a completely different tune. It’s so loud and at the forefront it makes it impossible to focus on anything else, in fact this is kind of a problem all over the album. Almost the complete opposite of Disintegration in a way, with that feeling of spaciousness it created, everything on here feels so close like you’re in a small room with the band playing live all crowded in and squeezed in there with you. All the different components that make up the music don’t get any room to breath, you can’t focus in on something in particular you really like on certain listens. Even on the tracks on here I quite enjoy, Want, This Is A Lie, Strange Attraction, Gone!, and Trap (notice the quick snappy song titles, which does kind of reflect the faster pace of this album) that problem still exists the different parts just seem to fit together more harmoniously so it isn’t a total mess. They’d still be better given some space I feel anyway, but then again I’m not a musician and I don’t know anything about how to make a good song I just know what I’ve liked and disliked. I guess it doesn’t really need to be said, but I rarely put this on and don’t have any real memories or emotional attachment to it. I’ll certainly listen to it again on occasion though.

Bloodflowers is the most similar to Disintegration, it’s basically a sequel. I’m not saying it doesn’t have it’s own identity at all, there are some elements specific to this album so it doesn’t just sound like a collection of songs that didn’t make the cut first time around, the acoustic guitar being so prominent throughout for example. Which is something I’ve heard and even agreed with at one point, but after getting to know it better I’ve grown to appreciate this album a lot more. Robert Smith has said in interviews that it along with Disintegration and Pornography are the three albums which best represent the band overall, or something like that, and he calls them his trilogy. I would personally say there are four essential Cure albums, Seventeen Seconds, Pornography, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Disintegration. Although I’ve read another interview where he says Seventeen Seconds is his favourite, I suppose in a four decade long career he’s gonna change his mind a bit, and of course whenever there’s a new record coming out you have to praise that. There is a feeling I get that the melancholy/ moodiness is played up a little here, which is fine because I like that kind of thing but it’s just done more maturely on Disintegration I have to say it. It’s not that it doesn’t feel genuine or that it’s coming from a real place, just that things are… well played up a little like I said. Anyway, onto the songs. The intro sets the mood pretty effectively, it’s nearly seven minutes long and that was after being shortened supposedly. The longer six and seven minute songs are something else borrowed from Disintegration, along with it’s overall sound and mood. Again though it’s something I enjoy, long drawn out songs that bring you into a different world. You have that acoustic guitar being strummed throughout like I mentioned earlier, and while I’ve never really payed close attention to the lyrics on this album you can pick up on the wistful vibe from snippets here and there. The second track on here is probably what prevented the album from clicking with me for so long, it’s this huge 11 minute epic that takes ages to build. It should be perfect for me, I’ve listened to Carnage Visors (mostly on nightwalks) a bunch of times, which is this half hour instrumental/ ambient thing which has only recently been so easily accessible to people since the re-release of Faith. For decades it was like a bootleg cassette tape you had to track down. So I really dig the longer stuff, but this song just really doesn’t work for me. The intro as well, but this track in particular just doesn’t resonate. I wish I could explain why, but I can’t it’s just how it is. So together what with the long length that’s almost 20 minutes. A really weak first part, and an obstacle that really did stop me from relistening to this album in full after the first time because I kept giving up during this song.

It was worth pushing through when I did though, because from here on out it’s much more enjoyable. Where The Birds Always Sing which is the highlight of the album absolutely and I’d already heard it plenty of times before hearing it in the context of the full album from the early days first discovering the band. If Disintegration was a twilight wander through the forest, Bloodflowers is a walk home during the sunset at the beginning of autumn. That’s the feel I get, maybe because that’s what I was doing when it finally “clicked”. In fact that’s definitely why, it’s been almost a year and that image is still firmly what comes to mind when I hear this record. There’s even a song on here called The End Of Summer, it all comes together quite nicely. It wasn’t a very eventful period for me, just before I got the job actually. I was pretty aimless, I still am but this was the peak, there wasn’t any kind of future in my mind. I was living in a haze staying indoors for often two weeks straight and I might’ve stayed inside without leaving the flat once for that entire five month period (between losing my voluntary job which I took after falling for the “experience” meme and finding my current job) if not for the fact that I had to go to the jobcentre to get my NEETbux every couple weeks. I’d wake up late, I’d struggle to get to sleep every night and then to force myself out of bed in the morning afternoon. I had more free time than ever to play vidya/ watch anime or films/ read all those books I’d been meaning to get around to and yet I ended up doing less of all of those and just scrolling through the catalog on one of my main boards for ten hours a day or wasting my time listening to idiots on youtube repeat the same stupid shit over and over. I’m not trying to whine or feel sorry for myself I understand that I choose to be the person I am, but it was fucking miserable back then. Probably the second lowest place I’ve been in, for an extended period of time that is. Maybe the first I could go into another time. I will take being a wageslave over that any day, even when I have a really busy month and it’s going really shit I have felt far more spiritually satisfied since starting work. So this album and it’s association with the changing of the seasons is symbolic, because it also brings me back to a time when I entered a “new season” of my life in a way.

After Bloodflowers the next release was the self titled The Cure, which is quite ironic because this album to me is the least Cure sounding album of all of them. It’s the least definitive one in their entire discography, and I know I said that Wild Mood Swings and Three Imaginary Boys are fighting for the worst spot but after relistening to this today it might have just snuck in and snatched the title. It’s not terrible, and there are some really good songs, but as a whole I really didn’t enjoy listening to it again. Which is weird, I remember about half a year or so ago I quite liked it and was listening to it quite  a lot. I listened to it for the first time maybe a year ago or something, then kind of forgot and after going back to it I found it a nice change of pace from the other Cure albums. It was released in 2004 I believe, and very much seems to have been influenced by some trends in music at the time. Like a lot of the really accessible nu-metal bands, korn, limp bizkit, and was even co-produced by Ross Robinson who produced for those bands apparently. You can find this shit on Wikipedia if you care anyway, and the influence isn’t that strong you don’t have Robert doing harsh metal vocals and wearing those cringy Halloween masks when performing this stuff. It sounds like The Cure still, but you can feel the influence in subtle ways that are hard to explain for a pleb who doesn’t know shit about music. The tracks where the influence is most noticeable are actually my favourites on here though. Us Or Them has this great really heavy guitar which feels really present throughout and holds everything together, Robert’s yelping fits perfectly and even makes the edgy lyrics “Get your fucking world out of my head” … (gonna be a yikes from me) not sound completely cringe. Labyrinth sounds like a Nine Inch Nails song, which is a good thing because NIN is fucking rad. This grinding sound, like a motor or something is fantastic. Great angery music, it’s like if you took the bitterness from some of the pornography tracks but without the gloom and introspection there to tame it. The intro Lost as well I quite like, with the words “I can’t find myself” repeated over and over like a mantra getting more and more aggressive and the music spiking out at you alongside it. Everything else is forgettable or outright skippable, I hate to say it because I really don’t like skipping tracks when listening to an album but there it is. There’s another over ten minute “epic” right near the end, which again just doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t totally suck like Watching Me Fall, the long one from Bloodflowers, but it’s still not deserving of all that time being given to it. At least it’s at the end as I said so it doesn’t create this obstacle just for you to get started with the album. It’s still worth listening to in my opinion, every single Cure album is even if just once or twice, but it might have the most duds. I have no problem with angery Robert, and when he does it well it’s great.

Finally, 4:13 Dream, the last Cure album at least so far and almost a decade old now. Supposedly there’ll be another one, I hope there is. It’s not that this album is bad, it’s pretty good at least as good as Wish. It’s just for a band with such a fantastic career one last hurrah, another real masterpiece if Robert has it in him, would be great. This isn’t that, it’s not a masterpiece it’s kind of unremarkable honestly. Maybe they just don’t have the desire to make new music, in fact they clearly at least didn’t for the last ten years because of the long gap. They still perform, but I’m not and never have been interested in live music so it doesn’t matter to me. I actually completely agree with Varg, the studio release is the version of the music that is truest to the artist’s vision. Also music fans of all types are generally fucking trash, crowds of annoying faggots and concert thots singing along to the famous tracks would just make for a shitty evening. I’m not saying music is always a completely solitary experience, sometimes with the right people and the right choice of music the opposite is true, but I find most music is indeed best enjoyed alone. The first track on here Underneath The Stars is very Disintegration (I’m saying that a lot I know), it even has the twinkling chimes sprinkled in at one point. Most of the album is a lot more upbeat though, supposedly this was originally a double album like Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me but they scrapped most of the songs and this album collects the more cheery ones. Which becomes apparent on the second track The Only One, which has this bouncy guitar sound that I really like. The guitar playing is really nice on this record overall, it’s what saves the song Freakshow which would otherwise really not be my thing. Then you have a bunch of really unmemorable songs in the middle, which just drag on. Sirensong, The Real Snow White, Switch, The Perfect Boy and This. Here And Now. With You. You also have the song The Hungry Ghost in there somewhere though, with this really nice sound effect with the guitar. I had to look up a video of a live performance to figure out what it was they were doing. The guy, some bald dude don’t know his name, waggles that bar that’s on some electric guitars. I forget the name, my dad did tell me once because he knows how to play but I forget. The record finishes with It’s Over, which has this chaotic and really loud electric guitar drowning out the vocals so you can barely understand what he’s saying if you’re trying to pay attention. A mediocre end, to a mediocre record, hopefully not but very possibly at the end of a career that is anything but mediocre.

I’ve been thinking about why I consider The Cure to be my favourite band more seriously since I started this back in part 1. I remember reading this article a while ago, I’ll link it but archived because it’s the jew york times, although in the current year of 2k18 who still isn’t using adblock http://archive.is/poojo. Now the idea that the music we listen to in our youth, the age it gives as most important in the article being 13-16, isn’t groundbreaking news by any means but it’s nice that someone took the time to collect some real data on this. It’s worth reading, but I’m not really here to talk about the article just use that as a jumping off point. See most of the other bands who’ve made music that really emotionally resonates with me are all from that period of my life, 13-16 years old. Not that they were all formed or making music in that time necessarily, but rather they were just what I listened to regularly in that period. Kasabian (specifically their debut album and Velociraptor), Nirvana, The Smiths, Blue Oyster Cult, Summoning, The XX, and some others. The Cure are the only band that affect me just as much and aren’t associated with that time period. In fact they’re kind of associated with a really shitty period of time, listening to the music from the band was an escape in a way. Also the weird and changing mood and style of their music, from completely miserable and depressed to manic and energetic, really makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve spoken here before about how I can get mild mania sometimes and of course this feeling of mental desolation. I don’t think it’s that bad, like people who have actual mental illnesses, it’s not something that negatively impacts my life in any meaningful way. It is there though, and something I have to work with. Honestly though, I can’t really explain what it is about The Cure and their music that just so perfectly works for me. It’s something intuitive that I can’t explain, it’s almost something spiritual. Those other bands I just mentioned can take me back to a happier time, but The Cure and no one else so far can take me away from all the bullshit entirely. Not unlike a dream.

My favourite band: Part 2

So I’ll just continue where I left off last time, maybe I’ll get this all finished here and maybe I’ll need a third part. If the scroll bar gets smaller than the width of my thumb I think it can be a bit much. Then again, I am the idiot who thinks that maybe one day some people will be willing to read all of these. That’s not what I’m here to talk about today though. After Pornography it seemed like everything was over. The band hadn’t officially disbanded, but one of the three members that were still around by the time Pornography was being recorded left and so it was just Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst who I think mostly played the drums and sometimes the keyboard at that point. Then they decided to take some time away from recording or performing for a while, and it probably felt at the time like The Cure was finished. Then after some months, out of nowhere and sounding nothing like before The Cure came out with a new single, Let’s Go To Bed. The first of several that would be released over the following couple years. It starts off sounding almost like a song from a children’s tv show, like one of the sesame street songs or something. It’s really bouncy and there’s this “doot doot doot” noise that sounds like a toy horn or something and then Robert’s voice comes in alongside humming “doot doot doot” to match it. Then after about a minute in this jangly guitar playing starts, and the vocals seem a little less playful for a bit before slipping back into that same jovial feeling and back and forth until the end. This is the first track on the Japanese Whispers compilation album, which collects all the standalone singles released in the period between Pornography and the next full studio LP along with some of their b-sides. If you’re going through their discography in chronological order this album, and Let’s Go To Bed specifically as the first track you hear, will stand out as a total change of direction immediately. I would absolutely consider this to be a crucial part of their discography and worth listening to along with their albums, unlike the other singles compilations Staring At The Sea and Greatest Hits because JW is much more consistent and focused on a short three year period. None of the tracks on it were on another album like most of the ones from the other compilations either. There have been other standalone singles from The Cure and they’re definitely worth listening to, Charlotte Sometimes is probably in my top five songs from the band, but you can just check them out any time.

There is an undercurrent of melancholy still present even here though, for example the second track The Dream which is supposedly about a miscarriage. The song starts with these weird noises, like a chorus of kittens yelping and mewing and a synthy sound in the background. The vocals are a little more gloomy than the last track but it still sounds like Robert is having fun on here. The drums on this song are also really unique, they feel almost spongy if that makes sense. It’s quite a weird one, next up is the closest sounding to their previous stuff. Just One Kiss almost sounds to me like it could have been originally something intended for Pornography but reworked quite a lot. The drums are heavier like on there, but yet for whatever reason instead of sounding completely oppressive there’s this hopefulness. Not just from the drums, I get that feeling from the song as a whole, it’s like they tweaked all the most important elements of Pornography just enough to completely change the vibe but yet keep a very similar sound. Even the lyrics are very similar in style “somebody died for this… somebody died” Robert moans at you but then “for just one kiss” and the whole mood is relaxed a little. I don’t need to go over every song on here, that’s what ended up bogging me down so much last time. There is a general theme you get from this project, the tracks are mostly pretty similar in tone. Some are more synth based or guitar based etc. There’s weird little things like the kittens and this twinkling that shows up a lot and The Walk has this oriental sound to it. It’s like the band rediscovering a love for music and experimenting with ideas and just having fun again. I said with Pornography that it was not for background listening, well this is the exact opposite, it’s perfect to have on when you’re not doing anything serious and want to keep the mood light. I actually listen to this one a lot in the evening when I want to keep positive and get /comfy/. I don’t really have any memories associated with any of the songs on here, maybe La Ment because it was one of those few songs I was listening to a lot in that early period when I first discovered the band so I associate it with that time. The miserable goth rock icon had been replaced by a weird parody of the pop stars of the era.

So after a few years of just releasing occasional singles but mostly not doing anything with the band it was time to get back and work on something new. Not to say that the members and former members weren’t doing other things. Smith for example had recorded a psychedelic collab album with a different group called The Glove which is actually really cool (Blue Sunshine it’s called if you want to check it out) and also been touring as a temporary member of Siouxsie and The Banshees and was on a few tracks on their album Hyaena. Anyway, on The Top they decided that it was time to get even weirder. Clearly heavily influenced by the psych pop he’d been around and involved in a lot, some of the songs on here were even considered for being on Blue Sunshine instead, this album feels like a trip. In both senses actually, because a few of the songs have sounds influenced by different styles of music from around the world. Bird Mad Girl and The Caterpillar both have a very mediterranean feel, The Wailing Wall naturally has a middle eastern vibe (so does the cover art for the album I think, the font seems inspired by Arabic lettering) and The Empty World sounds inspired by the military parades from any one of the small tin-pot dictatorships of south america. I can definitely understand why a lot of people don’t like this album, it was critically panned at the time from what I understand, but I think that it’s quite unique in The Cure’s catalogue and it’s probably the most wacky album they ever put out. It takes a lot of the ideas and sounds they’d been experimenting with up until this point and makes something that is tonally the complete opposite in one sense from what came before. The gruesome/ violent imagery in the lyrics is there, but with Robert’s delivery (changing pitch mid sentence, yelping and shouting and laughing maniacally, etc.) and the music it accompanies being so different the entire effect is different. You have the guitar being played very much like it was on the opener to Pornography, in that spiralling kind of way, on a few tracks. I really think that if you haven’t given it a go yet you should check this out. I didn’t listen to it for quite a while, only after one of the customers at work heard me listening to the band and recommended it did I get around to it. It’s not something I listen to often, because it requires a specific mood and if you’re not in that headspace it just feels abrasive and irritating but when it’s the right moment it’s a really good time.

After The Top came The Head On The Door, and I’ll be honest I don’t really like it that much. It’s grown on me but it’s just kind of… unimpressive, at least compared to what they’d been doing up until this point. Supposedly the goal was for the album to be like an anthology with each track being it’s own separate thing rather than there being a more overarching theme to the album. The opening track Inbetween Days sets the mood very well, it’s like the chart pop singles of the day, with “catchiness” being a deliberate goal going into this project. Robert even said this himself in interviews around the time of the release. He also said that this was the first Cure album made without the assistance of frequent drug use. The weirdness still comes out at times, for example The Blood which is like a slightly cleaned up version of a song that could have appeared on The Top and Six Different Ways which was apparently inspired by a conversation the band had about how many ways there are to skin a cat. I still enjoy the songs that sound like they were made with the charts in mind like Push, the intro and of course A Night Like This too. Listening back to this after not hearing it in quite a while was really enjoyable, but it’s just one of their less creative albums I feel like. The anthology idea is interesting, but I think it’s executed way better on the album Kaleidoscope by Siouxsie and the Banshees which was where Robert got the idea. A lot of the music and ideas for the band Robert had seem to be influenced by them actually, but while usually I find it to be an improvement in this case not so much.

Going back to A Night Like This though, I do have another fond memory associated with it which is why it’s a highlight on the album for me as I get to relive that a little. Again it was before I had heard the full album. During my training for the job I have now, I had to stay quite late for one of the practise shifts. I wasn’t alone of course, there training me was this Polish woman who was maybe 10 years or so older than me. She actually left very soon after I started, I think I was her replacement. Anyway she seemed to actually give a shit about me, which was odd. Not because of anything about me it was like she was this way with everyone, like an actual nice person. I mean it’s not like most people aren’t friendly, and some even have done things to help me before, but she was just warm and in a way maternal. I felt like a child when around her, I never was really attracted to her or saw her in that way even though she was objectively speaking quite pretty. I remember at one point I accidentally touched this hot sandwich maker in the back and she seemed really concerned and grabbed my hand to put it under cold water like you would with a little kid. It probably says a lot about me that this and all the other little things like it were something I liked so much. I won’t deny that I’m kind of developmentally stunted and probably looking for a mother figure. Being complimented various times, her making a real effort to get me to talk and be comfortable, bringing a warmer jacket for me because I had been cold on another evening shift there, her not seeming uncomfortable holding my arm or standing right near me, etc. all were appreciated. After about half a year of being pretty isolated and basically living like a complete hikikomori NEET having someone like this around was really helpful. Like I said she seemed to be like this just generally, I remember her fussing over one of the other girls who worked at the shop checking she was ok because apparently she had been ill just before I started my training. She helped make that transition from a NEET to having a job way way easier than it could have been and I really appreciate it. It’s also nice that I was able to have a genuinely positive acquaintanceship with a woman (even if only for a few weeks) that wasn’t tainted by me becoming attracted to her or developing some kind of romantic feelings like has happened with my various oneitises over the years. Sure I get along with my other female co-workers and manager and I’m not interested in them like that (other than the ones I’ve mentioned in previous posts obviously) but with them interactions are always pretty awkward. I feel like I make them uncomfortable like I do with almost everyone on this fucking planet, and even if I’m just imagining it I’m not imagining how they make me uncomfortable. I spent way too long on background information though, the memory itself is actually very quick to explain. It was one of my last training shifts with her, I had to stay really late until way after dark and I just remember getting home and listening to that song because I’d been enjoying it a lot already around that time and feeling like I was finally out of this prison I’d been in for the last half a year before that. Sure I might sometimes miss those NEET days when I’m halfway through a long week there but overall my life has improved noticeably since getting this job. I have more money to waste on things, I’m not completely isolated anymore and she helped me with that more than anyone else ever did. I wish more people were like her, life would be immeasurably easier for people like me. So now whenever I hear that song it takes me back to that period of time when I was doing my training, a time which I will always remember very fondly.

Anyway, back to talking about the band and not myself. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me is in my opinion another fantastic record. Being a double album it’s quite a lot longer than any of the other releases up to and after this point. I’ve listened to it a lot though, maybe almost as much as Seventeen Seconds and Disintegration which are the two that probably would be what I’d have to choose between if asked my favourite. If asked to describe this album quickly, I suppose I’d just give the name of one of my favourite songs on here Hot Hot Hot!!! It’s not just because of the fiery oranges and reds on the album art either, listening to this that’s how it feels. It’s the most energetic and vibrant they’ve ever sounded. They managed to take the intensity of Pornography, the psychedelic and hazy atmosphere of The Top and melt everything together in a pot to get something still as catchy and mainstream friendly as The Head On The Door. I really do mean “they” as well here. From interviews and articles it really seems like unlike The Top, which was all but a Robert Smith solo record, all five members of the band at the time contributed significantly to the project. This album might seem long, but there was just as much music that never got included and settling on the final 18 songs was difficult enough in order to make everyone feel included I imagine. This isn’t really anything to do with the album either by the way, but something that certainly added to that theme of heat and fire was that I was playing Dark Souls 2 and more specifically getting through Iron Keep the day I first heard this album in full. They go really well together, I get this feeling of moving steel contraptions and steam rising around me when I hear this album right from the intro now thanks to the association.

Anyway, I’ll get onto talking about some of my highlights from the record. Torture bursts out at you immediately with it’s aggressive drums and has this really cool bassline right the way through that keeps the energy up, and then towards the end these horns come in which ramp things up even more. How Beautiful You Are with what I think is a violin solo mid way through is another great one, the song itself is about a couple who encounter an impoverished man and his two children. The man looks at the woman and sees instead of sadness or empathy in her eyes a look of disgust, and in that moment realises she isn’t his soulmate but he was projecting who he wanted her to be or something like that. It’s kind of like what I was talking about in one of my earliest posts here isn’t it? It also serves as a perfect example of why I like this band’s music so much, there’s always this undercurrent of melancholy even when they’re at their most upbeat. Often even when I’m having a great time, meeting my friends and we’re laughing away all night or shitposting with the anons on /r9k/ and having a blast, I’ll get these occasional brief moments where I’m reminded that it’s only temporary and the gloom is just over the horizon waiting again. This experience is capture so well by The Cure, even if unintentionally. The Snakepit is this 6 minute long mostly instrumental mood piece near the middle of the album that slows the pace down briefly, yet still it has a lot of similar sounds. All I Want again is another track that’s just full of life, which is what makes this album so special in comparison to either their gloomy earlier stuff or their more standard chart pop like HOTD. This track has the sound that best represents the entire record, you can listen to this song and have a general idea of what the entire thing is like. Well, either that or Hot Hot Hot!!! which I already mentioned before. Another fantastically high energy song with a perfectly fitting title. You get real Fear And Loathing vibes, it feels like driving through the Nevada desert in a red convertible under the midday sun. The closing track Fight is another favourite of mine on here, ending the album with a hopeful and forward looking feeling. The total opposite of Faith for example, which was bleak and despondent, this album is able to build you up when you need it. So when the hurting starts and when the nightmares begin, remember you can fill up the sky. You don’t have to give in.

Looks like this will be three parts after all. I know this wasn’t as good as the first part I wrote, if I’m being honest as much as I enjoy almost all of their output the records I talked about last week are the ones that I have the most emotional attachment to and memories associated with. Other than Disintegration which I’ll save for next time I don’t have too much to say about what they made after this point. The thing is this is a blog I made to talk about myself primarily and last week’s part, while a good rundown of the band’s early discography (I hope), was strong because I was able to really get across why the band is so particularly special to me. With the memories associated with certain songs, and the way the albums resonate with me more generally. This isn’t an article about The Cure, it’s an entry on a personal blog about why they are my favourite band. I’m going to have a little conclusion at the end of the next part going into more detail on this I think. For now I just want to get this out because it took me longer to get started than I planned and I haven’t had anything out since last weekend.

Link to Part 3

My favourite band: Part 1

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 😉

Link to Part 2