Artists Condensed: The Cure (part two)

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Submitted by msarko on 5/19/09 2:26pm

The Cure is one of those bands that listeners try to encapsulate with a particular sound, but were never actually beholden to any one style. Some remember the gothic bookends, others the poppy middle years, still others have the band's handful of forlorn love songs stand in for their entire run. We all develop internal relationships with our favorite artists by applying their music to periods of our lives, but in the end that's really just a lot like snipping a particular individual out of a larger photograph and calling what remains the full picture. Given the constant rotation of members and frequent alterations of style, the full discography of The Cure ends up looking like a collage anyway. Snipping out your favorite part is easier because of this, but doing so dismisses the artfulness of the whole.

I'm going to go out on a limb and call "Just Like Heaven" the greatest song of the New Wave sound. It's funny that it comes on the heels of The Cure's most schizophrenic period, sonically and otherwise. It has a prominent, driving beat, a humble but excellent guitar hook and some of the best sing-along lyrics in the history of pop music. It's no wonder people fixate on this period of The Cure's career.

  • The Kiss
  • Hot Hot Hot!!!
  • A Thousand Hours (no link, sorry. buy the album)

That's not to say the band wasn't still good at bringing the gloom when they wanted to. This time around, though, it had a maudlin theatricality tied to it.

  • Fight
  • Pictures of You
  • Closedown
  • Lovesong (extended)

Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Disintegration are both excellent albums, so it's something of a wonder that they came back-to-back. Disintegration became the band's most successful album on both sides of the Atlantic and it's also the best overall representation of The Cure. It has the poppy stuff, the gothy stuff and some of the harder-to-classify art-rock thrown in for good measure.

This is the sexiest song about being killed by a monster ever written.

Wish is something of a lopsided album. Cheeky gems like "Friday I'm In Love" stand alongside heartfelt ballads like "A Letter To Elise" but also share space with forgettable rock tracks like "Open". It's not reasonable to expect a band to produce three great albums in a row, so two and a half is respectable.

By the end of Wish it becomes apparent that Robert Smith is once again growing bored. He's played around with organic instrumentation, all stripes of pop music and successfully courted chart success. As we move into the last leg of The Cure Condensed, we'll see just how exhausted the band, and Smith by extension, becomes in the mid-1990's.

I'll be back on Thursday to close this one out. Until then, listen well.

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