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

back to the album:

I saw the Cure on tour in 2004, Curiosa of course, and while the set was quite abbreviated (i.e. 2 instead of 3 hours), i remember in Dallas hearing at least five (maybe six) Disintegration songs, which was utterly fantastic for me at the time. still love this album, and really looking forward to the 2008 Cure shows.

Dallas TX setlist (from A Chain of Flowers), with Disintegration songs bolded:

Lost, Plainsong, Labyrinth, Fascination Street, Before Three, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, The End of the World, Anniversary, Lovesong, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, Pictures of You, alt.end, A Strange Day, Disintegration, One Hundred Years, The Promise

Encore 1: M, Play For Today, A Forest

Encore 2: 10:15 Saturday Night, Boys Don't Cry.

i want to hear plainsong on the largest soundsystem ever

followed by running up that hill

hahaha cutty

Just had to slip in a Kate Bush mention, whoops! Hahaha. ;)

You know, I had a horrible experience where I played Disintegration (admittedly) on a crappy boombox when we were drywalling and repainting our living room, and a friend came by to lend a hand and part way through "Plainsong" she actually turned it off and said "now can we play something we can actually listen to?" I was gobsmacked and weirdly saddened by this episode.... so much so that this is the first time I've mentioned it to anyone and it must have happened, oh, three years ago or so!

(Needless to say, at the time, I said "no, you can't do that, you really fucking can't" and hit play again.)

So, um, anyway, I'm very glad to see I'm not weird and alone in my "Plainsong" love, after all.

god, I hope they play Plainsong first on this tour. I've never seen them live.

Some tremendous momments, indeed, but i wouldn't place it even in their top five.

So, um, anyway, I'm very glad to see I'm not weird and alone in my "Plainsong" love, after all.

Oh god no you're not alone. Plainsong, as mentioned upthread, is far and away the best part of this album, and comes to mind immediately when I think of pretty much perfect intros to albums.

I think there's a thread somewhere where people "stripped an album down to its essence", eliminating songs until the most important or most vital track remains that expresses the album's mood or theme or whatever. A dubious activity for the most part, but it made sense when people stripped everything off Disintegration except Plainsong.

"Plainsong" is great, as are "Pictures Of You" and "Lullaby" too. And "Untitled". And I am even finally starting to like "Lullaby" a bit. But I still feel like the entire album doesn't quite hold up. The "huge" sound doesn't fit with this kind of music.

i still put this on on rainy days when I've got nothing to do except smoke and drink red wine and listen to this, and i 'play it lou' as per the instructions.

lou, loud, whatever!

otm. that's when i want it.

this is the best coming down album ever.

I'm not sure I'd want to listen to Lullaby when coming down.

This was the first album I ever bought the day it came out, rushing from school to get a train to town before the shops shut.

I replaced that long-lost cassette with a nice vinyl copy (which I got for £4, along with Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me at the same price) just the other day, and it's great coming back to it. It sounds much better, and much grander than it did.

I partly agree with Geir, though. Something about those big drums doesn't sound quite right.

The sequencing of this albuum from "Prayers For Rain" onwards is one of the most perfect orderings of songs ever put together by a band.

This album alone really shaped my whole musical (and to a very large extent non-musical) world when it came out and I was 13. A friend had lent me a huge batch of tapes he got from Columbia House and after checking out the Midnight Oils, the Simple Minds and the Eurythmics, I finally put on that one tape. I knew straight from the opening synths of Plainsong that things would never really be the same for me. Utterly awesome.

When exactly did it come out? In my memory, I'm younger than the release date says. Must have been early in '89.

Spring '89. I remember getting a copy of it from a friend during track practice and playing it on a crappy crappy tape deck that was so bad I couldn't hear the chimes at the beginning of "Plainsong".

The live version of Fascination Street on what I now learn is called Entreat (I spent several pre-Internet years wondering what this was called) is absolutely fantastic, as I remember, although I haven't heard it in ... 16 years - Jesus.

Entreat is fucking amazing. That version of "Prayers For Rain"...!

otm

god, "entreat"! i'd forgotten about the very existence of that. another thing i must have on a C90 somewhere :/

The version of "Disintegration" on Entreat may be my single favorite Cure song (glad I don't actually have to pick). The tempo is picked up a bit and Robert sounds so desperate. It's lovely.

i also remember being really excited for "Mixed Up", (which came out within a year of Disintegration, I think) - but then being really disappointed by almost all the remixes, especially the ones from Disintegration... but this was mostly made up for by the awesomeness of "Harold and Joe" - the b-side from the "Mixed Up" 12".

I forgot about "Harold and Joe" – it's got that weird bass guitar burp/hiccup hook.

matt2 otm. the version of "disintegration" entreat is vicious! robert gasping for air and shit!

I quite like the electric version of Plainsong featured on the Festival 2005 dvd. Smith's scraped bass strings sound gigantic.

ooh. i've not heard that ...

Probably shocking for most Cure fans, but I love it.
The whole dvd is quite good, in my opinion - first time in years they seemed genuinely intrested in shaking a bit their formula.

interested, even.

I so need to get that Festival DVD.

Mixed Up pissed me off because I had three of the four Disintegration singles already, so I already had those remixes (and I hated the "Lullaby" remix). The dubby "Pictures of You" remix was (and is) completely brilliant, though.

The sequencing of this album from "Prayers For Rain" onwards is one of the most perfect orderings of songs ever put together by a band.
-- HI DERE, Monday, October 29, 2007 9:54 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

hay i fixed that for you okay? ^^^

I'm not a big fan of "Closedown".

Fool!

You are not the first person to say this.

I'm not a big fan of "Plainsong" though.

uh

"Plainsong" has never worked live for me. I always think it always sounds thin.

i'd like to hear it live, but can imagine that yes, it could be disappointing.

baaderonixx: wow! really? hey ho. horses, courses etc.

Well I don't dislike it but I've always seen it more as a dirgy intro that might be a bit too pompous for its own good (which is maybe the one thing you could fault the album for).

I'm kinda liking this sludgy metal version though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93vIIKvnFOc

Anyone knows when the next batch of remasters will be released?
(Relevant in this thread as "Disintegration" will obviously be among them)

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

"Closedown" is awesome!!

"Closedown" is half-baked.

I was about to protest until I checked my iTunes and found that I'd ripped the whole album except "Closedown"! Hmmm...

your mom is half-baked.

a album that changed everything about me.

not the best album ever made but is my personal number one album of all time.

weirdly, mixed up was the first cure album i bought though!

"...beginning with....ESSSSSS"

If it wasn't for "Never Enough, I'd feel like they never actually recovered from doing the "Lullaby" video. Like, they went "okay, we have reached our platonic ideal so there's really no point in trying on any other video we do" or something; I can't think of any other explanation for the "Friday I'm In Love", "Wrong Number" or "Taking Off".

Although I'd forgotten about the video for "The 13th" lolol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N9piZjt_k8

Also I really really hate the single mix of "Lullaby"; I think it kind of ruins the song.

I hope the spider man has you for dinner tonight.

Maybe it's nostalgia talking, but I love "Never Enough."

That's not nostalgia, that is a fucking SLEDGEHAMMER of a song.

"Never Enough" remains fantastic, I remember at the time it was claimed this was them 'going baggy'

I love that stuttered guitar bit on the Mixed Up version.

Also the single had a killer B-side in "Harold and Joe" and a remix of "Let's Go to Bed" that should have been on the main album, really.

i think Never Enough was what convinced me to buy Mixed Up -- still love that song.

The video for "The 13th" really makes me regret that its the only time they worked with sophie mueller. I might have even gotten into later singles if she was there to help.

Really my only regret about this album is that not everyone went as batshit over "Lullaby" as they did over "Lovesong".

NEW ILM POLL: Most accessible, instantly relatatable Robert Smith lyric?

"However far away, I will always love you" - 85

...
..
.

"The spiderman is having me for dinner tonight" - 2

"I stoned the only girl I loved, and drowned her deep in sodomy" 15

okay if that was the actual lyric, I would be even more into that song

I can't imagine how fucked up my life would have been at fifteen had it been the actual lyric.

lots of otm-ness here. Absolutely loved Never Enough when it came out shame they immediately dropped the main riff when they played it live

and Ned otm indeed - the LOGTB remix was my favorite from that project. Such a strange and intriguing vibe from that version

Hearing that and Orbit's Shiver mix of "Inbetween Days" made me think Mixed Up was going to be much, much better than it actually was.

uggghhhh mixed up

still pissed off about that mix of "The Caterpillar" tbh

hahahaha YES YOU ARE CORRECT

tbh Inbetween Days and yes Caterpillar were the most horrendous things on that

haha totally loved mixed up when it was the only cure album i owned back in elementary school, not even sure where my copy went after I finally heard the originals.

The best ones were left off ("Lets Go To Bed" and "Primary"), but I don't dislike the "Caterpillar" remix.

The album versions of "Why Can't I Be You" and "Hot Hot Hot" are much more exciting than the Mixed Up versions.

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.