The Cure: Classic or Dud?

Anything to add, Ned?

The idea is to encourage people to be forthright in their opinion but it's not a vote or anything. It's a catchier way of saying "what do you think of this band?"

Cheers!

(PS: Dud. A couple of the singles are nice musically, even very good, but they have Smith's horrible smeared moan over the top of them. He sounds like a fourteen-year-old with a splinter in his toe: there's something wheedling about his voice which makes me want to smack him and tell him to get a grip rather than empathise with him.)

Seriously.. though it seems the norm to slag 'em off these days, it's amazing just how much good stuff they have done. 'Boy's Don't Cry'/'3 Imaginary Boys' is a great debut, whichever version you have. Scratchy wired glum-pop. In fact it's all classic up to 'The Top', their first major clunker.

'Head on the Door' is great pop. 'Kiss Me X3' is also great pop ('Just Like Heaven'), except where they try too hard to make great pop and fail ('Hot, Hot, Hot'). 'Disintegration' is their last great album. But not pop. No problem.

My last encounter with The Cure was 'Wild Mood Swings'. I swung my copy back from whence it came - Record and Tape Exchange. Still, 'Galore' sums up the later years nicely.

Anyway I like old Bob, a pop man at heart even in his gloomiest moments.

Classic. And if you disagree with me I'll shove all twenty or so CDRs of rare and odd stuff I have of theirs down your throat and kill you. *proceeds to light candles to huge _Disintegration_ poster in room*

The Cure are a band who, like Depeche Mode and a number of others of that ilk, should have just hung it up on December 31, 1989. Their glory days were in the 1980s, Disintegration should have been their last album. It would have been a perfect ending. Instead, they chose to put out three subpar releases in the 1990s. While Bloodflowers was a definite improvement over Wild Mood Swings (did *anyone* like that album?) and Wish (which came out at the peak of my Cure fandom and still disappointed me), it still wasn't close to the material they released during the 1980s.

Yeah, some of their stuff is whiny and pretentious. But I think they manage to pull it off reasonably well, and I think the whininess and the pretentiousness will make them staples of every sad-sack high school kid for the next thirty years, whether they continue to release new albums or not. (And hopefully they won't, judging from the poor quality of their most recent albums--I think that the more bad stuff they release, the less "legendary" they'll become.)

By the way, I *was* a teenage goth girl. I was also an early-20s goth girl. I own a velvet and lace cape and little pointy boots and black lipstick. Heh.

_Wild Mood Swings_ is more problematic. It's a very erratic album and contains a couple of songs that never should have seen the light of day ("Mint Car", "Return"). However, it also contains the absolutely marvelous "The 13th", "Want", "Gone!" and "Jupiter Crash". Some judicious editing (and swapping some album tracks for b-sides) would make this a much better album.

For me, _Bloodflowers_ compares very well to their 80's output. It seems that the group got back into a good songwriting groove for this album, which is particularly evident on "Out Of This World", "The Loudest Sound", "The Last Day Of Summer", "Bloodflowers", and "Watching Me Fall" (Cure cliches and all). The album has a strong sense of flow and there are no embarrassing attempts to rewrite "Friday I'm In Love". It was a good ending for them, assuming that Robert's latest pronouncements about the band's demise are actually true this time.

There are individual songs I don't like, and _Wild Mood Swings_ is easily my least- favorite of their albums, but I'd be hard-pressed to say that I actively dislike any of the Cure's albums.

They have many good tunes. However, they have many bad ones, viz "Friday I'm In Love".

Still, at their best they show an impressive ability to make both poppy goth jumpathons and total doomfests.

I had a girlfriend once who was into these boys hard and she used to play is it 'Pictures of You' (?) over and over and over (a sort of pining for a lost love I think; not me, incidentally). Anyway, it used to bore the hell out of me, not to mention what felt like a large hole in my brain.

The thing is, with the Cure, it's like the Manic Street FUCKING Preachers syndrome - people who like 'em don't just like 'em, they fucking LOVE 'em, and think they're prophets or something. No, they are miserable, half-goths with absolutely nothing to say and even less charisma.

That said, I am admit that I am hardly familiar know their canon, since I can't bear exposure to it for protracated periods.

Still; DUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUD

Hmm, having said that, I do get riled when someone fails to 'get' my favourite bands and indulges in the kind of mindless attack I have already posted against The Cure. Yet, I feel that certain bands are wont to attract a more dependent following, who hang the band's music like metaphorical rosaries. And I'm not sure that even among my most beloved artists, there are those which I could hold in such equally mindless esteem.

What say you?

DUD

Yet I do wonder how much my own nosatlgia plays a role. I still think Wish is great, despite every. review. ever. written. Maybe if I hadn't listened to it for the 1st time as a teenager travelling thru Europe with schoomates I'd think differently.

Also, I really really like the Wolfgang Press song on _Lonely is an Eyesore_, but I've heard their recordings are pretty patchy. Any recommendations there?

the "cure=suburbia" part of Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine is one of the best things ever!

Classic, BTW. Again, my mid-teens coincided with Disintegration and I was full-on obsessed for a couple of years. I bought a shedload of albums at Oxfam last year, and a friend and I drove our GF/wives insane by listening, back to back, to 17 Seconds, Faith, Pornography and the Top. Divorce was on the horizon by the end of that evening.

Thing is, there are SO many B-sides and rarities which have officially surfaced that they'd have to put out a box set. As it is, if the remasters that are surfacing next year are going to include bonus discs for each with room for other oddities, then that will partially settle the problem.

Suddenly I stop
And I know it's too late
69ing in a forest
All alone

I have questions

Also:

Fall fall fall fall
Into the wall
Jump, jump out of time
Fall fall fall fall
Out of the sky
Cover my face
While the animals 69

The album title's a METAPHOR, god

Xp

Sometimes we would spend the night
Just 69ing on the floor
And even though it felt soft at the time
I always used to wake up sore

Show me show me show me
Show me how you 69 that trick

(If you will.)

You remember that day in Paris
When we wandered through the rain
And promised to each other
That we'd always sixty-nine
And dreamed that dream
To be two souls as one

I would say I’m sorry
If I thought that you would 69

This is stranger than I thought
Six different ways inside my heart
And every one I’ll keep tonight
Six different ways to 69

Wait, just occurred to me that we haven't done the joke in the opposite (Magnetic Fields) direction.

The book of lovecats is long and boring

I really want a cover of Lost that undoes all the ugly production/screaming and really knows what to do with that bassline - the latter swoops in and out a la Swastika Eyes in the version in my head

― you can see me from westbury white horse, Monday, 17 October 2022 15:05 (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Such a pity this wasn't seventeen seconds ago.

<ding>

Another new song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_Eumowa5Q

Musically sounds like they calculated the exact median between Homesick and Untitled, then went from there. Lyrically it is (unusually) openly about the death of his brother, there was a bit of a preamble about it too. Followed up with the most committed version of Disintegration I've seen in years and years.

Really hope this new album is well-recorded. The new songs sound Disintegration-y but with (even) less variation - reminds me a bit of that last Pink Floyd album The Endless River, where every song sounds a bit like another song and the resulting effect creates a kind of ambient rock feel.

Stunning, I want this album NOW.

Another new song, Fargile Thing;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmxUSFj8p1o

Sorry, song is actually called "A Fragile Thing.'

i preferred the original title

Yeah, "Fargile Thing" would be a great title.

probably my least favourite of the new songs? the closest musically to that Bloodflowersy MOR plod - underwhelming drum patterns have killed a lot of latter-day Cure songs for me and this feels like another casualty

musing on what an Actually Good Cure LP might sound like in 2022, I thought that it could be great if they took Laughing Stock as a jumping-off point - really leaning into sparseness and silence, taking that lovely facility for constructing interlocking melody parts and deconstructing it- minimal goth pastoral, if you will

(admittedly it is a weird pastime daydreaming about how beloved legacy band might make interesting creative choices, but I suppose ILM is a relatively safe space for this kind of thing)

Step 1: Sack Jason
Step 2: *literally anything*
Step 3: Brilliant album

I just want the new album to drop already, obviously it's done. I only listen to these previews once or twice so they will be still sort of unknown when that finally happens.

xp tbh i am still pretty skeptical of Reeves Gabrels as a Cure member - recently someone on twitter posted video of his solo from From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea - and it sounds dumb but it struck me in a way it hadn’t before that a member of Tin Machine was in The Cure - and at that point I had to have a little lie down

Bee OK there was some talk on twitter that something would be released digitally before the end of the year (but vinyl wouldn’t be til 2023)

multiple pinches of salt required obviously

I don't see it happening this year because of Wish but it should happen in the first of 2023.

*First half

gabrels is a good guitar player but he is wanky in ways that the cure don't need; but generally speaking he kind of tones it down in the cure. which also means, I'm not sure why he needs to be there, or why it needs to be him.

He and Jason certainly don't make the band *better*, at least not to my ears, so clearly Robert must just like having them around.

If Perry coming back means that Reeves gets to Wrong Number all over the new album, I can put up with Jason

I guess to Robert the lure of a Bowie guitarist was irresistible. I do like his work on Earthling altho it’s not remotely Cure-appropriate.

I am an actual big Tin Machine fan and have a lot of time for Reeves as creative foil for Bowie - but yeah not at all sure that his aesthetic really sits well with the Cure, to AKM's point, he seems to be fairly diligently playing away from his own style and thus starts to feel a bit like a session muso

He's pulled off less weird solos than I would have expected and that honestly is a plus. I was pretty impressed with the solo he did on "A Night Like This" when I last saw the band in 2016; I was expecting him to wave his dildo around but instead he did a really nice replacement of the sax solo part without replicating it.

Reeves’ wife spent a good amount of time chatting with me about him and the band on Twitter, it was very sweet

I think it’s obv that Robert and him get along well. They’ve been doing random collabs since the mid 90s. More puzzling to me is why he brought back Perry who doesn’t seem to be anything on stage and looks pretty miserable doing so.

My theory is he has major dirt on Robert

"he wears makeup, you know"

BRING BACK LOL

wow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXxiLwwmx4M

wow indeed. I hope the music is healing, it's amazing to see him so engaged and present in his work after such a long time.

I'm not sure I approve of this kind of bleakness being unleashed on fans of The Cure - I mean, if I was in a bad enough place, I'm not sure this couldn't be the push. And I'm not even gloomy or depressed, usually.

I had avoided all of the new songs until now and oh my god, this is legit the best thing I’ve heard from them since 1992

This new song has an extremely strong "Bloodflowers" vibe. Not saying that's a bad thing.

this guy knows what's up

Good band imo

It's been rumored.

got my Wish deluxe edition in the mail today!

quite Disintegration heavy tonight. apart from Burn nothing later than Wish except for 4 new songs all of which I liked. amazing gig, super glad I went

I've had the Wish deluxe CDs on repeat in the car for a couple of weeks now. Lots of interesting bonus tracks and alternate arrangements.

Last night’s THIRTY TWO song setlist from @thecure at Wembley last night (2 hours and 37 minutes of utter bliss) pic.twitter.com/fiAmiq2G7G

— Tim Burgess (@Tim_Burgess) December 14, 2022

Loving this Wish reissue a lot, really worthwhile demo material imho.

Made a Lost Wishes Plus playlist that adds the other instrumental demos that never ended up as album tracks or B-sides, just to ride the vibe.

1. "Uyea Sound"
2. "Cloudberry"
3. "Off To Sleep..."
4. "The Three Sisters"
5. "A Wendy Band"
6. "T6"
7. "T7"
8. "T8"
9. "Now is the Time"
10. "Miss Van Gogh"
11. "Abetabw"
12. "Heart Attack"
13. "Swing Change"
14. "Frogfish"

might play around with the order, but was having fun with their naming convention for a few of the demos in that placement

So there's a big ol' photo book out and I had things to say

https://thequietus.com/articles/32523-pictures-of-you-the-cure-tom-sheehan-review