Between 1980 and 1982, the Cure switched lineups, switched producers, made friends with the pop charts, and steadily toured Europe. They also got drunk, got weird, got in fistfights with one another, took loads of drugs, walked off tour, and generally danced through some surreal Kabuki version of the Libertines' recent press. We're looking for a word and the word is "tumult."
Which makes it kind of striking that they also, during those same years, released three remarkable records that represent the first phase of their many-phased career. These albums are the latest in Rhino's series of two-disc deluxe-package reissues: Stylish smoke-and-mirrors new-wave on Seventeen Seconds, dark pop drama on Faith, and all-out emotional assault on Pornography.
What's so remarkable about them? Start with Seventeen Seconds, which is a perfect example of the kind of record that's been subdivided out of existence-- a lying-in-bed-dreaming record, a guitar record that make no distinction between pop pulse, rock catharsis, and the atmospheric space we now mostly get from computers. With this album, it's all three at once-- all the austere, spooky grace of Robert Smith's Asian-art fixations gathering up to inhabit a clean, minimalist new-wave package. Album-accounting types might get antsy over how many of these tracks are about building mood, slinking along as the exact opposite of today's amaze-me-now aesthetics. But even the shiftiest of iPod types, buried beneath the covers some morning, will remember that an album like this doesn't work any other way. The sound is like a bare room with four guys in black occupying just enough space to let you wander on your own, and when they stop slinking around and let the pop move-- see "Play for Today"-- they do it with incredible elegance, winking and posing from behind the smoke machine.
And then there's Faith, which sounds best of the three in about 60% of normal human moods. It's best in those bean-counting album-consistency more-for-your-money terms, sure, but that's hardly the big draw; the thrill here is hearing the Cure shape up into the singular band that trailed on through the next couple of decades. This is a band, after all, that did something indie guitar bands haven't lately been so great at-- tapping into vivid emotional drama in a form that felt entirely unpremeditated, creating a fantasy world coherent and accessible enough that your average 13-year-old didn't need to be up on any scenes to get sucked into it. A band whose career highlights were all about shading one intense emotion into another-- blurring the line between severe depression and total joy, making bright colors and Christmas seem like the mopiest things ever, and eventually, with Disintegration, making an album that was both oceanically bleak and entirely sparkly-beautiful, to the point where you imagine ghost-couples ballroom dancing to it.
It all takes shape on Faith. Just listen to "The Funeral Party", a gorgeous, slow-moving synth wash that anticipates both Disintegration and the theme from "Twin Peaks". This album winds its way from ultra-sophisticated pop thrills ("Primary") to synth mope ("All Cats are Grey") to fierce snarls ("Doubt") to snakey exoticism ("Other Voices"), all without ever changing its raw, minimalist instrumental setup or really seeming to shift course at all. It's packed with effortless old-fashioned emotional communication; it's a stone-cold classic; and here we reach the point where critics temper fan-boy impulses and leave well enough alone.
All that emotional richness just brings us back to all that tumult, which somehow manages to color every inch of this material without laying hands on the performances: No matter how much the songs reek of crisis and desperation, the band seems as calm and on-point as a ballet troupe. That's precisely what makes Pornography-- which totally owns that other 40% of human moods-- work. This is one of those records where a band walks into the studio feeling stripped and grim and dedicates itself to creating something exactly as big and frightening, yelling at the producers that they really want that part to sound that ugly; Smith himself says he wanted the album to be "virtually unbearable."
Which would make this the best possible failure. The result isn't as double-dark bleak as people like to pretend, thanks to the same streaks of vigor and beauty that make it such an obvious precursor to Disintegration. Smith's said the two records are part of a trilogy, and you can hear exactly that: The minimalist sound gets abandoned for just the kind of big, booming drama they came back to at the end of the decade, and the tired wailing of a track like "The Figurehead" sounds perfectly natural next to something like "Fascination Street". The record's most harrowing moment turns out to be a single: "The Hanging Garden", which is mostly just the relentless pounding of a single drum, with Simon Gallup's signature bass sound (the moves of a snake and the same scaly texture) rumbling beside it. If Smith wanted "unbearable," he should have hired a different singer, because his voice makes this-- and just about everything else-- completely thrilling.
Listen through any of these recordings, in fact, and you'll find yourself hanging on his every breath and moan, every word sounding as perfectly in-place as the well-groomed claps and trills of a chart-pop production. On "The Hanging Garden", he makes an understated wail hit you like a scream, which isn't a bad lesson for the world's hammier Iggy-wannabes: Half of the this stuff's wild intensity comes from how calm and steely-eyed and purposeful and just plain sweatless he sounds, and I can't imagine any other approach that could make a listener feel comfortable singing along with lines like "Cover my face as the animals die." Run the mood over to forlorn, and it's "I could lose myself in Chinese art and American girls"; run it back to fierce, and it's "It doesn't matter if we all die"-- just three of countless phrases that come out of his mouth sounding way more important than anyone else could manage.
So that's three of the discs; the bonuses are a whole other animal. With so much of the Cure's single and B-side output already heavily compiled, this series has mostly restricted its extras to the kind of source material that proves a serious feast for box-set-owning Cure geeks: Scratchy home demos, rough studio takes, live performances, and associated rarities. Most notable on Faith and Pornography are the mood-setting instrumentals from the films that introduced the band on tour ("Carnage Visors" and "Airlock"); with Seventeen Seconds it's the A- and B sides, studio and live, of the sole single by Cult Hero, the project Smith and Gallup used to test their musical compatibility. (It sounds like either Ian Dury or Jilted John.)
The rest of the Seventeen Seconds set offers some terrifically-recorded live material, as does the second disc of Faith; the Cure put a lot of studio time and echo-pressing power into giving Smith's voice the huge open-air sound these performances get pre-packaged. Across the rest of Faith's extras, the rarities pick up into material that seems more than just archival. There's the much-loved "Charlotte Sometimes" single, but the real gems are a quartet of studio out-takes-- three surprisingly sprightly instrumental tests (Smith mostly just moans) and an early version of "Primary" that's pretty much a whole other equally good song. (Current acts who aren't Radiohead may take note of what writing in the studio can accomplish.)
Fullest of all, for obvious reasons, is the Pornography bonus; we're still working our way up to the sets of alternate takes and shelved songs that will probably accompany late-80s albums. Instrumental sketches of songs like "Demise" and "Temptation" can let you play Robert Smith at home (you are all of you welcome to record your own vocal tracks and send the results my way), and a totally-different early version of "The Hanging Garden" gives another weird look behind the tumult: Dysfunctional as the band may have been, they clearly still had the work ethic to write and rewrite songs until they turned out perfect. The live tracks here, sadly, aren't nearly as hi-fi as elsewhere.
And that, in six discs and too many words, is phase one of the Cure, neatly packaged and neatly slipcased. When Rhino started this series, the timing seemed appropriate: The new-wave revivalists may not have tried copping these moves yet, but bands like the Rapture certainly had. Listening through these albums, though, you might come to a different realization. Old-fashioned and rockist as these criteria may be, the fact is that these albums have a raw resonance that frees them almost entirely from time and trend. The next few packages, after all, will see them dance through any number of timely styles without losing that center. And by the time we reach the ones beyond that, they'll have created the teenage-escapist fantasy world for which they're most remembered-- one whose singular thrills haven't changed with time or age. I'm looking over the stacks, and I can't spot any other band I can say that about.
