WILD MOOD SWINGS (aka the worst Cure album by a country mile)

"The sun is up, I'm so happy I could scream"

I could never get enough of that kind of songs. "Mint Car" is one of the best ever Cure songs, only beaten by "Let's Go To Bed" and "Friday I'm In Love". I LOVE HAPPY TWEE SONGS!

And "Wild Mood Swings" >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "The Cure"

Btw. this should have been called "This is a Poll" :)

No it shouldn't have.

'want' by a very significant margin. though to be honest, i think i haven't heard a number of these songs more than once.

I love this record. It's general mood is not what you expect from the Cure, but that's part of why I like it so much. Just got the 2xLP not too long ago for cheap. Not sure why there is any distaste for this record.

Because it's terrible?

only clicked on this thread for reliable Geir lols

(xp)

I mean, if you want a list of the problems by song:

"Want" is good but gets chopped off right when the song becomes interesting.
"Club America" is a shambling mess of bad ideas executed poorly.
"This Is A Lie" is a nice-enough instrumental arrangement ruined by some truly atrocious vocals and lyrics.
"The 13th" is an unambiguously good song, but it's kind of a problem when you have to go past the first three songs to find something that isn't truncated, completely ill-conceived or just mangled by poor editing/execution.
"Strange Attraction" is a self-indulgent piece of poisonous horseshit.
"Mint Car" is an attempt to do wide-eyed, sweet and charming that winds up sounding plodding, trite and overwrought.
"Jupiter Crash" has some nice musical ideas in it but isn't allowed to develop into anything.
"Round & Round & Round" works well as a live jam but sound completely enervating on the album.
"Gone!" does actually work but has such a bonkers vocal on it that it's almost guaranteed to turn most people off.
"Numb" is a good song that may lie a little too far on the static side to really grab people's attention; that's probably intentional given the subject matter but it would have been more effective with cleverer lyrics.
"Return" is a frightmarish attempt to do mania that basically trips all over itself and doesn't succeed in being anything but hyper-annoying.
"Trap" is a good song that actually develops within the framework of its running time and doesn't have a wholly embarrassing vocal on it.
"Treasure" is a nice, quiet song that does capture the wistful mood of the lyrics very well.
"Bare" is one of the only songs on the album that feels like it has space to breathe due to its longer running time; it's also one of the few tracks allowed to grow organically as opposed to being smashed from one part to another or cut off right when things sound like they're going to become interesting. Unfortunately, the placid, mellow timbre of the song makes it kind of boring.

Those are all terrible reasons to dislike those tracks.

I like Mint Car but I also don't. I voted for it and wish I hadn't.

(LJ, I'm betting that if you listen to the last 3 songs in isolation from the rest of the album, you will like them a hell of a lot more.)

Apologies to Robert, but it's all downhill from "Want" (an admittedly stunning opener) on this album.

I remember having a bad hunch about this album so I don't think I actually listened to it until...like 1999 or so. Probably for the best.

― Ned Raggett,

I avoided it until at least 2003.

I've never even heard this. I quit the Cure after Wish.

FTR this is the only post-Wish album worth avoiding, although it's better to get the Japanese edition of The Cure than the US/UK one.

true, but that's still a frustrating experience (as was the last record)

haha I am on record as someone who strenuously disagrees with that so I'm not going to get into all of that again

I'm with akm more or less, though I understand your reasons for disagreeing and also will not get into it.

I was torn because I felt compelled to vote for the WORST song on the album to fit with the general tenor of the question.

agreed that this is the worst Cure album.

i was going to try and listen before voting but that didn't happen. "Treasure"

god this was awful. this was the off-the-bus point for all the huge cure fans i knew.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

What the hell is wrong with people

^

One of the best Cure songs ever is of course the best song on this album :)

"This Is a Lie" was a bit robbed tho.

wtf. 3 votes for Strange Attraction?

I would have figured "The 13th" over "Mint Car" but I'm not surprised the singles and the opening track got the most votes from an album people probably had a hard time listening to. So the 4 votes for Jupiter Crash is what I find surprising.

Guilty of voting "Jupiter Crash". This was partly because it was one of the only songs here I could still bring a portion of to mind, and it wasn't a recoil moment so it got the vote. But it's a really half-hearted vote.

I guess that's the most merciful thing for me about this album - despite being horrifying while it's on, it's also pretty forgettable when it's over.

"Home" really is much much better than almost everything on this album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1loAO9y3dA

Love "The 13th".

But I haven't listened to any Cure album that came after this abomination. From Disintegration to this, in two albums!

Boris was way more integral to their sound than Robert knew

I thought "Wrong Number" was on this one. I really love that song!

Will always love "Mint Car". Fantastic song.

WTF happened with this album. how was it so bad? the dropoff in quality from Wish is astonishing, it's like a completely different band.

I thought "Wrong Number" was on this one. I really love that song!

Appeared the following year on a singles comp. (Or was it 1998...)

WTF happened with this album. how was it so bad?

I blame the Lol lawsuit. Kinda.

really? as in they were distracted? maybe Lol was the secret genius all along.

Haha nothing quite like that, but it did seem to disrupt what had been a fairly steady creative process; in combination with Boris's departure...

It's several things:

- really poor, muddy engineering on most of the songs
- a new mushy, imprecise drummer who was not acting as the same type of mechanical foundational rock as the previous drummer, adding a lot of unsteadiness into the songs and hamstringing many of them from growing
- extra-music band issues pulling focus (aka "the Lol lawsuit") combined with the lightning rod for the band's negative energy going away, leaving that no place to go but into the music

Didn't Robert stop drinking between Wish and WMS? Probably a positive step, but also a major, fundamental change that would take time to incorporate and adapt to.

I spent some time listening to some 4:13 Dream songs today and it's startling how much crisper and more precise the drumming is from those sessions than it is on WMS, where it kind of sounds like Jason alternated between hitting everything on his kit and doing sub-Lol rock drum patterns.

So, I'm confused--'Wild Mood Swings' left no impression on me (age 16 when it was released, presumably bought it, as a huge 'Disintegration' fan, and the target age of most Cure manic-depression). But I finally bought the 'Join the Dots' compilation, and was shocked to find that the b-sides from this album I don't at all remember are great--quintessential Cure, but with some nice spaciousness/breathing room in the mixes, and great string quartet elements on most tracks. "Home," "It Used To Be Me," "Ocean," "Adonais" are very top-shelf Cure with some interesting and not terribly dated production flourishes, and "A Pink Dream" and "Waiting" are pretty good.

So now I've ordered this album to give it a listen, but looking it up here it is apparently dross. So what happened? Did they just pick all the wrong tracks, when they had at least a 'Wish'-level solid 25-minute start if they'd used these b-sides? Or have I suddenly become way too forgiving of mediocre The Cure, after tending to consider them a very hot-or-cold quality level act (though great, overall) for the last 25 years I've been listening?

(Also--is there anything else post-'Wish' that's worth hearing?)

Maybe some illustrations in order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssq79gTlpkY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHPl35Sty10

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

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

No, the sad thing is that the B-sides are actually so much better than most of what actually went on the album itself... it's one of the biggest issues Cure fans have with the LP... it could have been so much better!

I'd edit those two down a couple of minutes tho... there's no reason why those two songs need to be 5min+ long.

And yeah, 'More Than This' is one of their better 90s tunes. Shame it's pretty much forgotten by this point.

Yeah those 3 are amongst my favorite 90's Cure songs and none of them are really that well known which is a shame. I mean the video for Wrong Number is one of their best ones just because how psychedelic and crazy it is and it only has like 50,000 views on youtube! Why?

Was Wild Mood Swings anyone else's first Cure album? Talk about Doing Cure Wrong.
Sound advice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mblx_jYFZmQ

Wild Mood Swings was one of my first Cure albums in the late 90s when I bought a handful of their CDs used (the others were Wish and Staring at the Sea).

the only song on this album that's bad is "club america"

i know it's wrong to love "strange attraction" as much as i do but i don't want to be right. low key my favorite robert smith lyric too

lmao i love "jupiter crash" soooo much too

after i realized the smashing pumpkins adore was a perfect record as a kid i gravitated toward albums that were mostly hated by their fanbase, and i ended up listening to wild mood swings a lot as a result... the other cure records i had were kiss me and disintegration so it's not like i was unfamiliar with prime cure. but there's a playfulness to this album that always charms me (especially "gone!" i feel like i'm the only person who has any strong feelings about this song whatsoever, but jazzy r&b the cure is so fun to me), and whenever it pulls me in i get shattered all over again by how good the ballads are. "numb"! "treasure"! "bare"! jeez

like wish but to a much greater extent, it could've been one of the great cure mood pieces had they worked the ballads and the b-sides into one sequence. but i love it for what it is still

hard to overstate however how a song as good as "waiting" should never be a b-side

I always liked "Trap."

brad i rep hard for "gone!" it's usually a toss up between that, "more than this", and "jupiter crash" for my favorite thing of this era. here's the critter mix for "gone!" i mentioned upthread:

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

i know it's cool to discredit jason, but any live recordings you can find from the swing tour are worth your time. "disintegration" on that tour was rarely better.

am also a big fan of "proper mess" albums like this. it's not the best anything, but it's damned entertaining to me.

re jason - i remember reading somewhere that the swing tour was the last time they played without a click track - what I’ve heard definitely sounds a bit more lively

never found a way into WMS but i saw them play Jupiter Crash once and found it charming- and Want was a worthy LP opener

"Want" is quite good indeed.

Yeah "Gone!" is groovy as hell, and the album in general is underrated. "Mint Car" is transcendent tho--maybe the most euphoric pop song ever, and the fact that it's by this band makes it even better

“Mint Car” was the first Cure song I ever heard when I was like 9.

I immediatly loved the tone in the vocalist’s voice, but didn’t excite me enough to listen to more of their music until many years later when I heard “lullaby”.

Mint Car is glorious; The 13th is even better!

I thought The 13th was a completely genius comeback single when it came out and couldn't understand why the entire universe seemed underwhelmed and a bit embarrassed by it.

I think I got the vibe about this when I heard the single, with the line "Yeah, I Feel That Good" and decided that was the least good line in a song, ever. Not even "terrible", just useless.

(unless I'm thinking of some other song on some other album)

Here is the best defense of this album that I have ever read. She almost makes me want to listen to it again, this article was just released and a bit long.

https://www.popmatters.com/cure-wild-mood-swings-genre-jumping

Just finished reading thread and never gave my experience. When WMS came out I was not in the mood for new Cure. I think I bought and played it once and then filed it away. I never really gave it a chance. I know I played it when I got back into the Cure but it's not a good album. It is way too long and doesn't flow well. I do think there are some good songs on it but really hard to reach for this album when you have 12 others you can play instead.

That defense is an amusing read but it's not a good album. The B-sides on the other hand are amazing as been told on this thread.

Which is why I will be curious as to the reissue, whenever it comes along.

Kiss Me‘s best songs, like “Why Can’t I Be You” chase away dizzy pop and bounce into a snarky funk that dissolves into ethereal serenades. “One More Time” slides into jazzy ditties and “Hot Hot Hot!!!” scats toward Beatnik Rap that then bursts into the sludgy psychedelia of “Shiver and Shake”.

uh, what

I love how you can see a wall of bills advertising the “Mint Car” single in Mike Leigh’s 1997 film Calendar Girls, which then segues into a brief conversation among the two protagonists who talk about no longer following the band

I still like this, still listen on occasion. It's in my "headcanon" as the Cure's last album--not near the heights of about everything through 'Disintegration,' but to my ears, better than 'Wish' and certainly far, far better than the 'Wild Mood Swings' that was actually issued:

This has stayed in my rotation all month. And after spending more time with 'Connect the Dots,' probably contains most of my favorite Cure b-sides. . .

The Cure - 'This Is A Lie'
'Wild Mood Swings' 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'

― Soundslike, Tuesday, August 15, 2017 12:34 AM (five years ago)