Why is there no thread for The Cure's Disintegration?

Finally holding a copy in my hot little hands, thanks to the wonderful Mrs. via/chicago. Ironic that such a notoriously depressing album would be the bright spot of my otherwise craptastic afternoon.

Happy 25th.

I freakin love the Cure. This was the first Cure album I ever heard, I found the vinyl used at a thrift store, and ended up giving it to a goth girl I had a crush on for Xmas. It's a shame it's such a nice day outside, it almost doesn't feel appropriate to play the album in such weather.

This will be wildly unpopular, but this record doesn't even make my Top 5 for Cure albums.. It's all a bit "samey" to me, but in a far different way than Faith or Seventeen Seconds were. No doubt that Disintegration paints some vast and desolate landscapes, and they are far more sophisticated than those displayed on those earlier somber albums. I mean, the love and longing oozes from beautifully stretched-out themes -- a very new trick for a band a decade in. I guess i like his more tortured material, or, sometimes the more bubble-gum-ey fun stuff.

Don't get me wrong, it was a great new place to move the material and it sold tons of copies, but really pointed to the beginning of the end in my view. For my money, the never were as lethal as they were with Kiss Me.

this weekend on a whim (if slightly inspired by the v tedious discussion of how much jason cooper sucks) i decided to listen to every cure record in order, and hitting disintegration was prob the most dramatic shift in the sequence; it's not really an aesthetic shift i think (it pretty clearly follows up on a lot of the ground staked out on kiss me and besides the most dramatic aesthetic shift in the cure discography is prob still pornography->"let's go to bed"); it's more about scale, where kiss me was a ton of very tonally distinct songs squeezed down into an excitable mercurial space where they could sit together dissonantly and constantly surprise!!! you, every song here is enormous and is almost its own individual space, so that the album feels to me like a series of linked domes in which different weather patterns are preserved

i've been mostly drawn to the expanded entreat on the deluxe reissue bc i've lived with the original album for fifteen years and it differs enough (especially in the shimmering guitar interludes on "pictures of you") that it's like hearing it from a slightly adjusted angle (it's also, as documented upthread, a really excellent performance), which is allowing me to additionally recognize that, even as my tastes have developed a lot since first hearing this at fifteen years old, disintegration and "plainsong" in particular contain so much of what i still value about music, they're like the permanent center of something around which the surface has drifted and warped considerably, and it still enriches and informs that drifting and warping. anyway, <3 u disintegration, i thought faith was maybe my new favorite cure record, but nope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G5YguuNSJg

A fine celebration. :-)

Happy 30th! <eek smiley>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv18HTqbqmw

first 5 minutes of this are a tear-jerker.