Dear readers, to label The Cure as a purely Goth rock band (or, conversely, a Top 40 alt rock band) would be totally inaccurate. Robert Smith – teased hair, lipstick, white makeup, cadaver clothes and all – and his morose associates are more than that. Yes, Smith dabbled into the prose of Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and all the other shiny happy people of Existential Literature, but he’s not a one-dimensional chap like the great Ian Curtis. Nowhere in the Joy Division canon does the surly Curtis sing, "We’re so wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty/Oh you know I’d do anything for you," or "If I only I thought of the right words/I wouldn’t be breaking apart all my pictures of you." Robert Smith is a romantic, the Frank Sinatra of the doomed.
The Cure as a unit is versatile, hard to pigeonhole. Musically, you could hear angular post-punk riffs in songs like Boys Don’t Cry and Fire in Cairo, and atmospheric, textural guitars and synthesizers in Pictures of You and Prayers for Rain. AC/DC, The Cure is not.
In terms of lyrics, the themes of absurdity and alienation abound in Cure songs. I submit a few lines from 10:15 Saturday Night:
And I’m crying for yesterday
And the tap drips
Drip drip drip drip drip drip drip
It’s always the same
Also, from The Funeral Party:
Two pale figures
Ache in silence
Timeless
In the quiet ground
Side by side
In age and sadness
Or our dear old friend Desolation from Grinding Halt:
No light
No people
No speak
No people…
Everything’s coming to a grinding halt…
Also, from The Drowning Man:
One by one her senses die
The memories fade
And leave her eyes
Still seeing worlds that never were
And one by one the bright birds leave her...
Numerous are the references to death: "A sound like a tiger thrashing in the water/Thrashing in the water/Over and over/We die one after the other…" (One Hundred Years); "In books/And films/And in life/And in heaven/The sound of slaughter/As your body turns…" (Pornography); "Sing out loud/We all die/Laughing into the fire…" (Siamese Twins); or anything in The Cure’s bleakly beautiful "Disintegration."
Yes, even if my "brother" prefers seeing Robert Smith with big hair and postmortem pallor, fumbling in stupid hi-tops and singing the post-punk English equivalent of Isang Linggong Pag-ibig (read: Friday, I’m In Love), my dark heart yearns for old Cure songs – the ones that make listeners feel "stone-white, so delicate, lost in the cold." Songs that could compel a young Czech to kill himself in a toilet in the middle of a Cure concert under a cloud of brutal gloom. A true story.
It’s hard to believe that The Cure released its first album "Three Imaginary Boys" in ’79 – the era of punk, disco and quasi-symphonic rock. The band followed it up with the dark, bleak trilogy "Seventeen Seconds" (’80), "Faith" (’81) and "Pornography" (’82). These three records have influenced such diverse acts like the Deftones and Interpol.
"Seventeen Seconds" is morose and minimalist, spawning The Cure’s first hit A Forest. "Faith" was created in an environmental cocktail of drugs, isolation and deaths in families. The album is so bereft of hope, Smith reportedly finished the vocals feeling "incredibly empty." Some songs in "Pornography" were cut in a toilet to get that dirty, grimy feeling. And when the band-members toured in support of the album, they smeared their eyes with lipstick so that when they sweated it looked as if their eyes were bleeding. And oh, Smith lifted song titles from Kafka.
"Japanese Whispers" (’83) is nothing like that trio of aural doom. It features ridiculously cheerful singles Let’s Go To Bed and The Lovecats (the Disney song for Goths). Smith called them pieces of "idiot pop" (which is probably more applicable to 10,000 covers from acoustic guitar-wielding Paolo Santos and Jimmy Bondoc).
"Head on the Door" (’85) was Smith’s attempt to make "Strawberry Fields-style pop music." It contains the hits Close to Me and In Between Days. "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" (’87) is sprawling and schizophrenic. It cemented Smith’s reputation as a pop sorcerer with hits Just Like Heaven and Catch.
"Disintegration" (’89) followed. It features epic, sweepingly melancholy keyboards and elliptical lyrics about breakups, ageing, dying and disintegrating. Dig the line:
I leave you with photographs
Pictures of trickery
Stains on the carpet and
Stains on the memory
Songs about happiness murmured in dreams
When we both of us knew
How the end always is
How the end always is…
It also contains Pictures of You, the love song with just the right amount of menace (and my all-time favorite Cure tune). While recording songs for "Disintegration," Smith reportedly took a monkish vow of silence. It was an unnerving experience for the band.
Other noteworthy Cure albums are "Wish" (’92) and "Bloodflowers" (2000), a collection of long dirges and five-minute-plus opuses. Both announced by Smith as The Cure’s "last." Yeah, right.
The first two songs on the album are gloomy, vintage Cure. In Labyrinth, Smith returns to his old existential ways: "Say it’s the same sun spinning in the same sky/Say it’s the same stars streaming in the same night/Tell me it’s the same world whirling through the same space/Tell me it’s the same time tripping through the same day…" Later in the song, he laments, "It’s not the same you."
Before Three lightens things up. The End of The World goes pop all over the place, a sweetener to the bitterness of Lost and Labyrinth. Dig that familiar bassline trotting under an ecstatic voice. It’s hard to believe that the guy who complains that the "sky is wrong" in track two is the same guy that animatedly states "I couldn’t love you more" in track four. It’s like listening to Hanging Garden one moment and then hearing Friday, I’m in Love the next. Although he backtracks a little by singing, "Maybe we didn’t understand… It’s just the end of the world."
Anniversary is nostalgic and atmospheric. Us or Them is one of the heaviest Cure songs to date. Here, the lyrics share headspace with Camus’ prose:
There is no terror in my heart
Death is with us all
We suck him down with our first breath
And spit him out as we fall…
Whew! Smith sounds like a professor sometimes. Although when I attended college, teachers with deathly pallor and corpse-like torsos taught physical education. How ironic.
alt.end has those inventive guitars going for it, while (I Don’t Know What’s Going) On will compel yuppies who dig flashy cars and "New Wave" to shake their khakis. Taking Off is another pop rhinestone. The Promise builds up slowly like The Same Deep Water As You and then reaches a stirring climax where the singer is left "still waiting." Waiting for Godot, perhaps?
(In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, Godot never shows up and the wait propels the whole absurd theater production. Godot could mean God, authenticity, epiphany, Elmer Fudd, anything. Maybe Smith was thinking along these lines. He’s one of those rockers who made good use of a library card.)
A caveat: One track titled The Boy I Never Knew didn’t make the final cut. It is said to be one of the saddest Cure songs ever penned. That’s too bad.
For all it’s worth, this is an excellent platter for Cure fans (whatever their preference), and for those who dig albums "recorded live in candlelit rooms and mixed very loud in the dark." And as always, Robert Smith sees the world as both a gorgeous and a gloomy place to live in. He thinks "hell is living with other people" and that a person can be "just like heaven." And he still believes that life is a weird procession of joy and despair. I think this is a healthy attitude. Schizophrenia, I guess, is not a malady but the human condition. (Fittingly enough, for the album cover, Smith asked his nephews and nieces to illustrate their best dreams and worst nightmares.)
"I can’t find myself," Smith murmurs at the start of the album. The same goes for all of us squirming in our happy doom.