"4:13 Dream" by the Cure

more pop to come! :)

i've listened to the new cure tribute album "perfect as cats" more than i've listened to this.

blackblack's cover of in between days rocks my socks.

So they're playing Las Vegas and all.

A recent interview with some bits, including more on the next album:

It was a less acrimonious split than that in 1989 with the Cure’s former drummer, founding member and chronic booze-hound Lol Tolhurst, who unsuccessfully sued Smith for unpaid royalties five years later.

Smith giggles ruefully. “The funniest thing about him taking us to court, or taking me to court in particular, was that he couldn’t actually remember all the things that would’ve won him the case at a f***ing stroke. I almost felt obliged morally to stand up and say: ‘Lol, don’t you remember the time that . . .’

“The worst thing we did to Lol was when me and Simon stripped him on the bus. We were pulling up to a hotel in Chicago, it was about five in the morning, we’re saying: ‘We’re going to a health club, Lol, we’re all gonna get a rub-down’. ‘Awloveeelovegreat.’ ‘We’re going to strip now and it’s straight out of the bus door, straight into a hot tub.’ He’s like: ‘Riiightoootherewaaghh’. So we pretend to take our trousers off and he actually takes his trousers off and his pants and at the bottom of the hotel steps there’s a porter with one of those luggage things with wheels. So we put Lol on it and go: ‘Into the hot tub!’ and we push him through reception of the Chicago Hilton. Simon rolls Lol into the lift and goes, ‘You f***ing idiot’ and the lift doors close.”

...

...they emerged with 33 songs completed, 13 of which made up, last October, the upbeat and experimental return to form, 4:13 Dream. Most of the rest will form the second, “dark”, half to that record’s lightness. Smith hopes to release it this year.

“It’s the companion piece, the nightmare piece to the dream thing,” he explains. “4:13 Dream ends on a dark minor chord and I feel like there’s an intermission and everyone goes out and goes: ‘Ooh, I wonder what’s going to happen next.’ The next one picks up where the last one ended.”

...

He’s intensely critical of his own label’s reluctance to let him put out the Olympic songs as a double set and plain livid when it comes to the download revolution. “It’s staggering the percentage of illegal downloads,” he says. “It’s almost silly in a tragic way. There’s a strange reluctance on the part of the majors [to tackle the issue]. Their artists suffer hugely from illegal downloading: they don’t sell legal units so the label doesn’t really have to pay them. But the label is owned by a parent company some way down the chain that owns the internet service provider. That side of it is very murky.

“The Radiohead experiment of paying what you want — I disagreed violently with that. You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all, and that’s nonsense. If I put a value on my music and no one’s prepared to pay that, then more fool me, but the idea that the value is created by the consumer is an idiot plan, it can’t work.”

Though softly spoken and giggly, Smith displays signs of being the oldest Angry Young Man in music (he will be 50 in April). And who can blame him: he’s credited with inventing a goth scene that he constantly disowns (“Most goth kids look really cool; I think those people would be horrified by the idea of us representing them”), is criticised for retaining his spider hair and make-up well into middle age (“The idea of growing old gracefully is immaterial. I look at myself and I’m kind of on the cusp at the moment. But I’m hanging in there”) and has been the focus of blame for some of his fans’ most violent extremes.

“I’ve been in the unfortunate position of having someone kill themselves onstage just prior to us going on,” he recalls with a shudder. “It was hugely disturbing. We were playing the Kiss Me set [1987-88] and it was an upbeat kind of night, but there was an emotional depth to the stage show that was put in perspective when that happened.

“It’s happened to us a few times. A policeman blew his brains out at the show in Czechoslovakia on that tour and on the Bloodflowers tour [200-2001] someone killed himself. It’s the ultimate theatre I suppose. It’s very difficult to sit on your own thinking about it, let alone get into the kind of mentality to do that public a thing.”

One suicide note sent to him by a fan was made into the lyrics of 4:13 Dream’s deceptively poppy The Reasons Why, including the line: “I won’t try to bring you down about my suicide/ If you promise not to sing about the reasons why.”

Whole thing's worth a read.

playing 'The Only One' now! maybe they will play it tonight.

I still don't believe that dark companion piece will ever come out.

i live in the Los Angeles area and Coachella is happening next weekend. because of the company that i work for, we deal with a lot of these type of bands. so today i picked up a band member from The Cure, it wasn't one of the main four but he is in the band. so i started my conversation and he says "yeah, i'm here for Coachella and with a band that you might have heard of called The Cure." i had a heart attack, i said not only have i heard of them but they are my favorite band of all time. so i started to ask questions and one of them was "is the 'nightmare' album going to come out this year?" he said that he doubt it and that they are done with Geffen Records, but i remember reading somewhere that they have one more record under contract with them. that album is done but he thinks Robert will sit on it and will release sometime in the future but not on Geffen and not this year. he said that the band is going to probably take a year off, than go from there. they are going to play in Las Vegas than they are off to Coachella with no more dates for the rest of this year.

i also have huge My Bloody Valentine news and will tell that story when i bump that thread.

i also met Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth yesterday, wanted to kiss her feet...

i also have huge My Bloody Valentine news and will tell that story when i bump that thread.

GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO

it wasn't one of the main four but he is in the band.

uh huh

but he thinks Robert will sit on it and will release sometime in the future

a completely different uh huh

Err, there are four band members these days, so was it like a roadie or sth?

shut up, Bee OK TOTALLY has a Candaian boyfriend!

↔

haha, i wrote that out when i was very drunk last night...that member was probably a sound guy or something...

wish the drums were mixed up/vox mixed down on this album.

"It's Over" is fucking fantastic, wow.

Was just thinking about that one the other day.

So how much you want to bet this 'sequel' album never comes out.

Oh and thanks French TV or whoever did this:

http://craigjparker.blogspot.com/2009/07/live-in-paris-08-on-dime.html

The sequel album will come out shortly after Robert's solo album.

I kind of wish they would just do a string of random singles and EPs.

Porl Thompson gives a new definition of glam rock in those videos.

Haha - I pity the fool who ever believed that whole dark sequel BS. See you in 4 years for another batch of dreamy pop tunes ("we recorded some of the most amazing stuff we ever did, but it just didn't fit on the album this time")

there's a lot of buzzing regarding an imminent announcement on live dates and it seems pretty much a given at this point that Roger O'Donnell is now back in the band

oh hot

and If I can read through the lines, I have a feeling they're gearing up to play the 'Faith' album

thank god.

4:13 dream is kind of terrible. I can't listen to it. I think it's the production. the songs I guess are alright, but it's hard to get into, and so tiring to listen to .

It is mostly the production; Robert's become kind of enamored with this muddiness that sometimes works well ("The Scream", "It's Over") and sometimes gets in the way of the song ("This. Here and Now. With You").

Basically, if the whole album was aggro freakout songs it would read much better.

crap production indeed, as well as persistent annoying vocal ticks (SHOUTING EVERYTHING!!!). But tbh at the end of teh day these songs were just alright for the most part but nothing spectacular.
'Hungry Ghost' is the one I still come back to (although it is plagued by the aforementioned problems)

I still really dig "Underneath the Stars", "The Real Snow White", "The Holy Ghost", "The Scream" and "It's Over"

There are a number of keepers for me as well -- and hell, the shows were spectacular, so no complaints!

Yeah, the shows were fantastic!

xxp The Scream and It's Over start out great but then the whole muddiness gets exhausting (compare how raw the pretty similar "Shiver & Shake" sounds in comparison)

I think exhaustion is part of the point of those songs

My problem is with the mastering, rather than the production per se.
Superloud, ultra-compressed, it worked against a sound that apparently was meant to be as hazy and, yes, muddy as possible.
There was a number of good songs: I have a soft spot for the frantic funk of Freakshow - and forgive the alliteration.

agreed on the mastering

surprised they aren't going to haul out a disintegration tour, since the remaster came out in the past year....a disintegration/wish tour would be just fine with me. because I am a nostolgist.

I think I probably meant "mastering" rather than "production"

Good if they're going to play Faith live - I just hope they dust off the version of All Cats Are Grey played back in 89 rather that the lazy one performed during the Bloodflowers one.

About the 4:13 mastering: it is a pity, because all the "atmospheric" production touches turned out sort of flat and uninspired (see an otherwise excellent song like Underneath The Stars) and, despite the in-your-face sound, took away a lot of strenght from the freak-out songs.

so here it is:

"In two nights labeled Reflections, on May 31 and June 1, the band's mainstay, songwriter and owner of the worst applied make-up in rock, Robert Smith, will be joined by Simon Gallup on bass and Jason Cooper on drums for the performance of the 1979 album Three Imaginary Boys The original drummer, Lol Tolhurst - now playing keyboards and percussion - will join in for the albums Seventeen Seconds and Faith."

what woah

Kind of a weird move, but yeah woah.

Roger is supposed to be playing as well.

but with those albums, and not Roger-era albums, I might still stay more excited for Spiritualized doing Ladies & Gentlemen in the Opera Theatre and The Crystal Ark playing in the Studio

will be slightly annoyed that the late late announcement means I got Odd Future tickets for the Wednesday when I could have got the Thursday and not clashed tho

hoping Azari & III at a queer party in the Studio will be ace too

I'm guessing this'll be recorded for DVD like Trilogy. Which I'm more than fine with.

you know what would be wau, is if they pulled together shows where they plays specific albums and had the ppl who originally recorded them play the gig

looks like that was sort of the plan? except Robert can't let go of Jason

where are these going to be though? if on the forecourt it is going to SHIT up access for all the other venues good and proper

xpost -- Must all be down to blackmail or something. He's now the longest serving drummer of the Cure by about a decade!

xxxp haha yeah - maybe Roger is scheduled to play on the third phase of that tour.
Sign me up for the Japanese Whispers/Top gigs.

Now I'm imagining what the hell a Mixed Up show would be like.

as pointed out on CoF, this will be the first live performance of "Doubt" (and probably some of the instrumentals on 17S)

I was thinking that, "Doubt" finally gets a live airing!