The Cure: Classic or Dud?

listening to the S/T record for the first time since it came out and I kinda dismissed it. I am really enjoying it! getting super stoked about seeing em in LA on the 24th and working through the discography backwards. for a band that has been around forever its a pretty manageable body of work just looking at the LPs.

hoping they'll play Jupiter Crash on this tour.

The Cure start with "Plainsong" tonight. They also played "A Night Like This" and "This Twilight Garden."
― Bee OK, Wednesday, May 11, 2016 11:29 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if they play those songs at my show. i could die a happy man.

otm X 1000

Atlanta if you're reading robert

Ahhhh i can't wait to see them ahhhhh and yah Jason sucks

I saw them on the Curiosa fest and thought they were pretty good (a little before that I saw them in a club behind Bloodflowers; they were great). But then I saw them at a bigger place, as a 4-piece, in 2008, and was not feeling it for some reason.

Last time I saw them was 2008 in LA -- four-piece lineup as mentioned, their non-keyboard years, and I liked it for that reason. Stellar set and the new songs were great. I think for sheer stately wonder my favorite time seeing them was the Rose Bowl 1992, though I would have loved to have been at Dodger Stadium 1989.

my favorite show was the medium-sized stage tour they did in... 1998? I was in the 8th row for that one and it was fantastic

Yeah, anyone who caught that one I'm quite envious of. The other one I wish I had seen was the Reflections tour in LA but other factors prevented me from going, sadly.

ah, it was 1997: http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-cure/1997/orpheum-theatre-boston-ma-33d7e02d.html

hoping they'll play Jupiter Crash on this tour.

would lose my shit

are you talking about the pantageas show ned? yah i was there it was amazing.

i sorta love wild mood swings though. i was obsessed with it in high school bc i tended to be drawn to records that fanbases majorly hated

yeah Wild Mood Swings was my first Cure album that I paid attention to on release. Like, I bought The 13th CD single before the album dropped, and got WMS on release day. I feel that process of anticipating and being there when a new album comes out and hearing it fresh without any weight of history or consensus or reviews or anything is the best part of being a fan of any group.

My favorite is Jupiter Crashes, but I love Mint Car because its The Cure at their brightest and shiniest. I also have a lot of love for The 13th. Maybe my favorite Cure song with horns? Really the only song I actively dislike is Round & Round & Round. I also don't like that so many of the songs just have one word titles because it makes them hard to remember by name.

i loooove "the 13th"

Yeah, 'The 13th' easily one of my favourites on the album! 'Jupiter Crash' never really did all that much for me.

are you talking about the pantageas show ned? yah i was there it was amazing.

Very envious! Yeah I knew a number of people who went. Would have been a treat; I have a couple of good bootlegs from the various shows around the world.

I said Jupiter Crashes instead of Jupiter Crash and now I am embarrassed.

"The 13th" was definitely a skew-whiff effort in the best of ways, it really was unexpected in terms of what had come before as well as the context of 1996. And it just seems to float in its own universe.

Wish and Mixed Up were my first and favourite Cure records, because I was 13-14 when they came out, and emotionally they just seemed to *fit*. Weirdly, after that I bought a lot of the back catalogue but never any of the new releases - except the cassingle of The 13th.

I seem to remember the live versions of 13th had a female vocalist on the chors, and being disappointed she wasn't on the recorded version. Is that right?

"The 13th" was great and really elevated my expectations for WMS

When I got it and heard "Want", I was like "OMG YES YES YES THIS IS INCREDIBLE"

Then I heard "Club America"

I am still mad 20 years later

WMS has a bunch of good songs (Want, Jupiter Crash, The 13th, Trap, Treasure, Numb, Bare) and some songs that are ridiculous but I like anyway (Gone!, Round and Round and Round) but it also has some of the absolute worst things they have ever, ever recorded (Club America, Strange Attraction, Return, Mint Car, This Is A Lie) and my dislike for those songs has only increased as time has gone on, moving WMS from "their least successful album" to "unambiguously the worst album they've ever done and if I ever hear the whole thing again I may be force to cut someone"

I take it back about only disliking 'Round & Round & Round' on WMS. 'Gone!' is pretty terrible. And the lyrics to 'Numb' are unfortunate, to say the least. 'Treasure' is quite lovely!

awww, I like 'Return'!

tbf I didn't like "Gone!" that much until I encountered the Ultraliving mix

"Return" is, without a single doubt in my mind, the absolute worst song they have EVER recorded. I could probably write a novel about how much I hate that song.

I agree with Ned, re: 'The 13th' in that it was one of those singles that didn't seem to fit in anywhere... As the first new material from the band in ages it didn't really seem to logically follow on from Wish, but it sounded really out of whack with everything that was going on at the time. It was almost as if it been made by someone locked away in the studio and ignoring the outside world completely, only to re-emerge and be like "hey, have this!"

I like the sitar-y guitar part in 'Club America', but I've just been having a quick listen to Wild Mood Swings now and... a lot of this really hasn't aged very well, has it!?

Saw them from fourth row in June '92 at the Miami Arena. The set list.

check out all those Seventeen Seconds selections.

xxxp? i would read a synopsis of the "why 'Return' is the worst song The Cure have ever recorded.

As for the 13th, horn sections were kinda having a revival at the time with ska/swing/lounge music kind of bubbling up into the mainstream. so, its not totally out of step with the times. It still doesn't really fit in, but I can see the idea of thinking, "the kids will dig this!" at least from the point of view of a record company picking it as the first single.

and the Cur had always liked horns

'Mint Car' is still ace, IMO. I have never, and will never understand why folks dislike it.

"Mint Car" is saccharine nothingness, completely empty and shrill with none of the parts of the song coming together in any satisfying way. HOWEVER, all of its b-sides are amazing (particularly "Home").

"Return" takes that same saccharine nothingness, speeds it up, adds in an even uglier vocal and some of the cheesiest, most obvious keyboard riffs and horn blasts imaginable in a wholly self-satisfied, concentrated pile of aural garbage.

i think "strange attraction" rules. i love how cheesy it is

but then i also enjoy "return." good horns

I liked "Strange Attraction" for a couple of weeks and then one day the rambling meter of the verses mixed in with the super clunky chorus got on my nerves, like it was trying to be pop-goth inverted version of "We Belong Together" and failing miserably

that said, I do sill like the "I'm sorry/Blame infatuation/Blame imagination/I was sure you'd be the one but I was wrong" part of the song

first Cure album I picked up was Wild Mood Swings. Guess it was always going to take a while to get into them properly

"This Is A Lie" is one of my favourites on that album.

there are so many songs on this album where lyrically it feels like Robert completely lost his grip on the natural cadence of the English language

My first Cure show. Yes. Old. http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-cure/1985/radio-city-music-hall-new-york-ny-4bd7f70e.html

I never liked "Mint Car" much but I feel bad for Smith because he thought it was one of the greatest pop songs he'd ever done and was saddened that it didn't surpass "Friday I'm In Love" as a single.

lessons learned IMO

(seriously though, if they'd dumped half of WMS for the b-sides, it would have been so much better)

Talking about how bad WMS is kind of makes me sad. I don't understand what happened to them post Wish.
On most songs I want to tell Robert to calm the hell down and on the others he puts me to sleep. Also I'm not really sure what kind of sound they were going for, some with lots of cheesy synths, some very acoustic. Just a mess.

"Mint Car" is embarrassing. "Strange Attraction" could be great but at the time the production sounded like Jam & Lewis six years too late. I like, not love, "Want", "Jupiter Crash", "Gone!" and "The 13th". The rest is either awful or boring.

Well, Wild Mood Swings was really recorded by what you could call a "broken" band. They were pretty much auditioning drummers during the recording process, if I remember correctly.

"Strange Attraction" could be great but at the time the production sounded like Jam & Lewis six years too late

precisely why it rules

pretty much auditioning drummers during the recording process

Without the qualifiers, yes, they did this. Auditioners who played on the record are thanked in the sleeve, including Martin Gilks from Weknowwhereyoulive.

I think one of the things I do miss on Wild Mood Swings is Boris' approach to the drumming. Boris had a real knack of "composing" his drum parts which not only served the tracks but became hooks or riffs themselves. I love 'Want', for example, but often when listening to it I can't help but wonder what Boris would have done with it. There's certainly a lot of clattery drum fills on Wild Mood Swings which Boris would have probably avoided. Jason's use of the hi-hat spoils some of the earlier Cure songs live, too.

Conversely, I think Jason's bludgeony style is perfectly suited to songs like "Lost", "The Promise", "The Scream", "It's Over", "Before Three", and "All Kinds of Stuff"

Thought this revive would have been about the six deluxe edition CD reissues on Rhino released tomorrow. Not sure if these were previously released in the UK (I believe this was the case with the recent Sabbath reissues) but they're new to me! Definitely picking up Faith and Seventeen Seconds, and, if they're cheap enough, Pornography and Three Imaginary Boys (no real interest in HOTD or KMKMKM).