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

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!

When I get the CD, I guess I'll take the best three or four tracks from there and combine it with these b-sides and pretend that's the album. . .

Yes, the b-sides for this album are so disproportionate to the album's quality.

I think, of all their albums, only Wish had better b-sides.

Yeah the b sides are better than the album. I don't know what happened with this record; if it was record company interference or just very bad judgement by the band

Ok, so I couldn't resist--already ordered the album so guilt assuaged, I downloaded the album, so I could try to understand.

On (obvious very quick) first listen, it sounds like they'd lost confidence in their dramatic, darker, more aggressive sound; and thought instead they could make an album of "Lovecats" and "Friday I'm in Loves," which perhaps the label liked, and then it all went wrong from there, ending up sounding very 1996 in all the wrong ways. . .

Just based on sounds--on the consistent, foregrounded (at least for The Cure) use of strings--I wonder if they had an entirely different album in mind at first? Almost all of the very good b-sides have this feature, and the few salvageable (though not as strong as the b-sides) album tracks have the same prevalent strings.

That's actually somewhat true. RS had originally conceived Wild Mood Swings to be a more acoustic-based album, which explains the non-album material (see also the "Strings Mix" for 'This is a Lie' which was released as a b-side).

The album's sessions also began with the thought of Simon deciding to leave the group. Subsequently, RS plays bass on a few of the session's tracks. This is all detailed in the booklet notes in Join the Dots.

A lot had happened since Wish - Porl and Boris left, the Lol court case, Gallup was thinking about leaving... The Cure had been a broken band before, but they really struggled through this record. Their stock - in the UK at least - was also the lowest it had ever been. At that point in their career they were seen as being '80s relics.

Ok, so I know it's a bit silly, but. . . I'm loving this collection of songs, as an alternate "could have been" 1996 Cure album. Sequencing, even segues were a breeze, as if these tracks were meant to go together, had they just decided to focus in a little instead of wild-mood-swinging. Threw a little cover art together, nominated one of the tracks as title track, and it came together IMO as an album I think I'd like as much as 'Wish,' at least:

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/folder.jpg?w=800

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'

To me, it kind of sounds like the answer to the question (that probably nobody was asking, but still) "what if The Cure had been a 4AD band". Perhaps shows some belated influence of having Shelleyan Orphan open for them in '89? Anyway, it's really good, IMO.

Cool! I'll make a playlist and try it. Never gave Wild Mood Swings a chance really, but I listened to the orange b-sides album that came with Kiss Me way more than the actual album.

I hate Dredd Song but aside from that, this is the album they should have put out

I've never listened to the WMS b-sides so I'll check those out

as far as I can remember the real highlight of the last few albums was Underneath the Stars

WMS is a really interesting transitional Cure record, in some ways it reminds me of The Top (which is my personal favourite).

I really love the lighter moments like Round & Round & Round, the 13th, Strange Attraction, etc.

That sense of weightless fun is something missing for me from every subsequent album.

'Underneath the Stars', funnily enough, dates from around the time of Wish, I think. Even so, there's tracks on 4:13 Dream I like more, and Wild Mood Swings has its moments too.

B sides from the 'Wish' sessions >>>>>>>> all post 'Disintegration' output (even if they're all a bit on-the-nose!)

Yes, 'Underneath the Stars' was actually a revision of the song 'Uyea Sound' which was recorded during the Wish sessions and got released on the limited cassette only Lost Wishes.

If anybody already owns the music and would be interested in this version (with some segues and stuff), drop me a line and I'll share a link. It's really growing on me--given the consensus (here at least) seems to be that 'Wild Mood Swings' was a swing and a miss, kinda wish they'd put out something like this instead, or also.

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/folder.jpg?w=800

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'

I also made my own version of Wild Mood Swings some years back and it's the only way I've listened to the album ever since. It goes:

01 Want
02 Waiting
03 Home
04 This is a Lie
05 Ocean
06 Jupiter Crash
07 Treasure
08 The 13th
09 Adonais
10 A Pink Dream
11 Mint Car
12 Gone!
13 Trap
14 Numb
15 It Used to be Me
16 Bare

I'm listening to Lost Wishes as I type this and it's absolutely glorious.

Ha I wonder how many people are in the same boat--made an edit, and never went back to the actual album? Hopefully Smith et al wouldn't be offended too badly. . .

I did the same thing with the self-titled 2004 album, as the b-sides from those sessions were a lot stronger than the proper album as well.

'Jupiter Crash' is one of the songs I would cut, tbh.

'Want', 'The 13th' and 'Mint Car' would all be easy inclusions!

I like 'The 13th,' just didn't fit the sound that started coalescing. I'm keeping it as a bonus track "non-album single" hehe.

Want probably fits, but I just wanted to get it down to a shorter run time, had to be harsh. Mint car is fun--another good non-album single for me ; )

Yeah, shorter run time is always good... pretty much every Cure album from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me onwards is far too long, IMO. I've always preferred the vinyl config of Disintegration, for example!

'Jupiter Crash' is one of the songs I would cut, tbh.

You are not in the majority here.

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)