This review inaugurates what'll theoretically be a whole series of reviews, as Pitchfork follows Rhino's "revitalizing" the entire back catalog of the Cure-- each album wrapped in a modern package, with a bonus disc of associated rarities and a nice glossy linerful of notes and photos. Someday, as the president readjusts her bra, you'll scroll past ads for Suicide Women and find out what this publication really thinks of Bloodflowers; let's leave it to that future-critic to evaluate the Cure as a Big Historical Entity. For the time being, let's just note what this reissue program stands to remind us of: This is a band so idiosyncratic that people hardly even noticed as they remade themselves, drastically, again and again, with an ease that'd make Bowie blush. They made minimalist punk-scene oddities and great gloomy dirges; they made synthpop of both the fey new-wave and grim New Order varieties; they made strangely day-glo pop that used bongos and horns and occasionally pretended to be jazz; they made Disintegration. And all that in more or less its first decade, and all of it without sounding like anything other than The Cure just being The Cure.
So we start with this-- a straight-up, sonically-tweaked edition of the group's 1979 UK debut album. Later editions in this series will have the luxury of filling their bonus discs with high-quality outtakes and demos; to this one falls the task of collecting all the wobbly-legged rough takes every band gathers up in its infancy. The result is mostly anthropological-- and, yes, it's difficult to imagine anyone but die-hards and vintage punk enthusiasts needing a live rendition of a song called "Heroin Face". But the story told by the first half of these bonuses is a fascinating one.
Everyone familiar with bootlegs of a skinny 18-year-old Robert Smith and a band called the Easy Cure will recognize the sound, essentially that of the punk band that wasn't. Because no matter how much they try to sound hard, no matter how classically 1977 they get ("fiery" guitar solos!), and no matter how close they come to sounding like an Edward Gorey version of The Buzzcocks, you can hear something else bubbling up. And over the series of "home demos" that follows-- almost embarrassingly private ones, as if stolen from Lol Tolhurst's attic-- you can practically hear Smith realizing what that something is: He's interested in off-kilter pop songwriting, not the straight-ahead rush of punk; he's interested in slinky Roxy Music atmosphere and a dreamy, imaginary East, not gritty social realism. You might not spent hours relistening to a cheapy bedroom rough-draft of "10:15 Saturday Night"-- or even its first-run studio demo-- but as a chance to hear a band become itself, it's remarkable.
That's particularly true when the early result is something like Three Imaginary Boys, as original a record as anything else to spin off from the tail end of punk. These recordings are spare and simple-- just three guys in a room playing clean, clear lines and letting them ring. And yet everything snaps together like clockwork, from the ingenious songwriting to the precise performances to the decades-long thrill of Smith's voice. This is the simplicity of punk gone suddenly complex and spooky and sneakily psychedelic, whether it's on the creeping tick-tock thrill of "10:15 Saturday Night" or the sneering weirdness of "So What", which has Smith yelping the text of a coupon offer from a bag of sugar.
In spots such as the effortlessly, idiosyncratically gemlike "Fire in Cairo" and the bouncy, apocalyptic "Grinding Halt"-- both of which share some of the weightless charm that put "Boys Don't Cry" in the middle-school alternateen canon well into the 90s-- it's odd and quirky. In others, it spreads out the echo and gets slinky, trending toward later gloom. Is this what a new wave Wire might have sounded like, if they were better musicians and smoked opium and were interested in being sexy? Is this what a new wave Joy Division might have sounded like if they went for dreamy, guarded neurosis over the whole raw-passion thing? This is as bold as I'll get: Had The Cure retired after making this record, instead of complicating our appraisals with a whole ensuing career, this LP would be feted as an after-punk gem, a shinier oddball cousin to the current canon.
And through the second half of that bonus disc, we come to the less anthropological material that backs it up: album outtakes, rarities, live tracks, singles. The dream-pretty "Winter" fills out the echo and points to the future; "World War" might be the band's last raw sneer. We'll spare the incomparably geeky discussion that could be had about the singles, running to alternate international releases and outdated collections and recent box sets: Suffice to say that you do get "Boys Don't Cry" and "Jumping Someone Else's Train", the latter one of the band's snappiest, sharpest, and most natural early tunes. Listening to "Plastic Passion" or "Killing an Arab" will, for better or worse, involve purchasing other Cure product.
But this Cure product is a nice Cure product, no matter how little the casual fan needs basement-grotty demos or early live recordings. And it bodes well for a series of comparable packages, moving point by point through a catalog so broad and brilliant that it contains pockets and corners you can genuinely forget. Onward, then, until everyone's shocked and amazed to discover "The Caterpillar".
