A thread for the Cure reissues

https://i.imgur.com/t5v8xfs.png

What are the best WMS b-sides? That was my first Cure album, which put me off them for ages. Even now I can hardly muster the energy to put it on

Home
A Pink Dream
Ocean
It Used To Be Me
Adonis
Waiting

Good news indeed. Wish (heh) they'd included the B-sides.

You'll get that box set and you'll love it. (Why haven't you gotten that box set.)

All those WMS b sides sound fine but all very indistinct. Would they have made a superior album or would it be medium-paced water-treading? The feeling is that in the end, they picked the songs that had variety....

A few years back I made a "lost album" of tracks from 'Wild Mood Swings' and era b-sides, when (contra "indistinct") I realized there was a thread of consistent production signatures, particularly a heavy use of strings, across a good number of the tracks.

I honestly suspect there might have been a different album they had in mind at some point--many of the b-sides even have segues and transitional portions more like what you'd expect from an album. Surely not this exact track list (especially not including "Dredd Song"), but something like it. It's ultimately no 'Disintegration,' but I like it better than any proper album after that one. I've always been a fan of their more tonally consistent albums (i.e. 'Disintegration,' 'Faith,' etc.) than their "mood-swingy" ones, and their moody tracks more than their manic ones, so 'This Is A Lie' is, in my "head-canon," The Cure's mid-90s album:

The Cure - 'This Is A Lie'
('Wild Mood Swings' Era Reconsidered)

01 - Adonais
02 - Jupiter Crash*
03 - A Pink Dream
04 - Treasure*
05 - Home
06 - Waiting
07 - Dredd Song
08 - It Used to Be Me
09 - Numb*
10 - Ocean
11 - Bare*
12 - This Is A Lie (Ambient Mix)

Total Time: 53:43

* From 'Wild Mood Swings'

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/thisisalie_small.jpg

Assuming you have 'Wild Mood Swings' and the 'Connect The Dots' box, you can sequence it or download it here.

I was being a bit mean when I said the WMS B-sides are a better than "a lot" of the album proper. They sort of feel apart from it altogether to me which is probably due to the variety feel they were going for. The only real dud on the album for me is "Round & Round & Round".

Anyway, re:Wish, can I just say the Higher Mix of "High" is maybe a top 10 Cure track for me. Outdoes the album/single version completely, which to make room for the jangle has the keyboard arpeggios mixed far too low :(

Thanks for that excellent "lost album", Soundslike. I've listened to it a bunch of times now and enjoyed it. That's more than I can say for WMS, which I listened to probably 2x max and shelved in disappointment.

It's excellent rainy day Cure music, too. Love the 1-2 punch of "It Used To Be Me' into "Numb".

Glad you're enjoying it! It is oddly compelling--pulls one through its running time like an album should. All the strings and transition parts of the tracks make me think that must've been the intent, at one point. I definitely like it better and have listened to it many more times than 'Wild Mood Swings'.

Dunno. It does hang together and clearly that’s the album RS initially set out to do (admitted so in that recent extensive WMS retrospective in DEK magazine) but I find most of these songs ponderous and kinda boring (like most of his post-Wish output), mikes away from the eerie mystery of Nick Drake who was apparently the inspiration for that aborted album.

Well, it wouldn't make my top 5 Cure albums, but I was surprised at how good it is compared to how I thought about them at the time (largely due to finding WMS haphazard and its manic bits unconvincing).

woo! after twelve years of waiting my deluxe Cure CD collection will finally be complete

(wouldn't say no to nice deluxe editions of In Orange or Show, of course)

Hopefully the deluxe version of Wish will come with the correct tracklisting (no "Friday I'm In Love")

uh, What?

i assume that raven just doesn't like that song

nevermore!

I'll grant that it's very poppy and well overexposed, but it's the last time they were successful at writing a really good pop song.

I don’t know, Robert argues that Mint Car is a better pop song which should have been a hit and I kinda agree with him

The End Of The World felt like a very worthy Cure single to me at the time, although it hardly tore the charts up

also Mint Car sucks

yeo

yep too

i've come around and will defend "mint car", but that's still otm

Mint Car is my - maybe - third from the bottom on WMS. Prefer all the other singles, even Strange Attraction.

battle of shitty pop cure

"mint car" v "strange attraction" FITE

'Can I use some of your lipstick?' doesn't do as much damage as, oh no, 'a gorgeous strawberry kiiisss [kissing sound] [wolf-whistle]' :(

Also I really like the main instrumental melody on Strange Attraction and how Simon does bass overtime on the intro, as though he was meant to be playing a noisier song + how this all goes into some random calypso.

Christ i fucking loathe Mint Car.

"it almost hurts"

ste says it's perfect pop

probably wrote it years ago

Mint Car’s only crime is a) being a desperately faded carbon copy of Friday I’m In Love and a1) then actually being a single instead of tucked away on side 4, a b-side, or given to, idk, Saffron or someone

probably wrote it years ago

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, August 2, 2022 6:27 PM

ya, but that's like . . . never been true lol

uh trust me

The other crime of Mint Car is that it fukkin sux

Yeah but everyone writes a song that fukkin sux now and again

All my songs are glorious, what are you talking about

Lyrically inept but the guitar line is pretty nice. I feel it’s got more going on than Friday which is basically one nice riff and nothing else

i think Friday actually has a pretty nifty chord progression? that may have been dulled by familiarity? i remember thinking that Bm was pretty nifty back in 1992 anyway and the bridge is deft also. there’s a story about Robert Smith not quite trusting himself that it was original and ringing people up saying “are you sure i wrote this?”

i don’t really care for the song but I remember liking it a lot more as just an album track (which it was for a month!) than as a ubiquitous smash hit single and lifeless setlist staple

friday has great chord progressions and all kinds of change ups, it's not just one riff.

Another reason Mint Car suffers is on Greatest Hits it comes right after Friday - after a whole hour of very nice stuff in fact - and it is gruellingly revealed as no equal

Smith thought Mint Car was a better single than Friday I'm In Love - on Mint Car's Wikipedia page

Just remembered it was Strange Attraction that got the heave-ho to fit WMS on a C60 back in 1996

This chat inspired me to have a bit of a Wild Mood Swings day today. Hadn't listened to it in full since I missed that DEK Magazine last year with the enormous anniversary feature in which Robert apparently reflects on the album in thorough detail - still bummed that hasn't turned up anywhere else because I'm very interested to hear his thoughts on certain aspects in hindsight esp since he has been known in the past to parade it as one of their best albums (while studiously almost completely avoiding it live).

It's (still) a delightful mess, but I'm always attracted to the big 'failures' in the discographies of bands I love. I wasn't there in 95 so/but it feels strangely out of time to me - not in a positive sense as such, just that it seems a galaxy away from Wish, like the band had been 'completed' in 1993 or so and then there's just this strange album of underwritten and incongruent songs that seems to come much much much later even though it was actually just a few years.

Always confuses me how they pushed "The 13th" as the lead single knowing it would flop and still booked a tour that was longer than Wish and played to the same size (enormous) venues - many of which did not sold out and some in the US even having to be cancelled for bad sales. This is what I want to read explored in detail somewhere.

In 96!

Man, I loved The 13th. I was hoping the entire album would be horny and fun but it was sort of a drag. Song by song it's not bad, but strung together as an album it turns into a slog.

I have a friend who has zero time for The Cure, but he is passionately of the opinion that The 13th is their best song.

It’s crazy how irrelevant they felt in 1995/6 - I remember reading about them playing one of the UK Festivals (Reading maybe?) and even seeing the name felt like an echo from the distant past. The lineup change was pretty catastrophic but it also felt like RS had lost his touch at offering playful reflections of the sound of the day. For all his “we do what we want” rhetoric, he was always pretty adept at folding contemporary sonics into CureWorld, but no longer. Even the album art felt immediately dated and bad (a trend that would continue!)

Wild Mood Swings era is their last great era for artwork imo. After which I believe Robert wanted more say in their artwork if just for ever-growing control freak reasons, so Parched Art were outed and in came (beginning with the Five Swings Live EP) 'smART', which through Bloodflowers and The Cure just seems to amount to Robert Smith dicking around (and imo Driving Rain has nothing on Bloodflowers in the major act dropping a colossally amateur album cover stakes from around this time).

The most obviously mid-90s thing about WMS to me is "Club America", which everyone hates and all but it absolutely sounds like something from 1996. And the decision to use real strings on some songs instead of synth-strings feels like a post-MTV Unplugged trait (consciously so I think given that RS's original intention was for a stringy 'acoustic' album) (I guess it's quite a Britpoppish thing to do as well for what it's worth).