PondaBlog

The cure was one of the first bands that I really got into. I think the first album I heard, and owned, was 1985’s the head on the door. And a doozy that one is too, with some of their top tracks and a great gothy fluorescent feel. If I remember correctly, my Mom bought it for me on a trip to Ottawa. go figure.

What made me think of the cure again was a recent pitchfork review of the reissue of 1989’s disintegration.

A 10? Really? Y’know, at the time, I loved the album, and still do. However, it ain’t perfection.

But the cure damn near reached it with an outstanding trio of albums, the ‘80s answer to bowie’s brilliant ‘70s comedown triumvirate of low, lodger and heroes, formed in the shadow of cold war berlin.

So I worked my way backwards. started with the head on the door, got sucked in, and then began discovering the earlier output.

There are hints of what’s to come on the cure’s first album, boys don’t cry (released as three imaginary boys in the UK). “Killing an Arab,” which remains one of the cure’s signature tunes, gave a nod to the outsider, albert camus’s existentialist touchstone. But the brittle pop-punk sound doesn’t really presage the claustrophopia looming on the horizon.

Up next is seventeen seconds, the first of the cure’s great trio, released in 1980. The sparse sound of boys don’t cry remains, but something else starts to seep in, a sound of confusion, a hint of dread. And they’re branching out – there’s a reverbed, gauzy effect that takes hold on seventeen seconds, a cloak that’s slowly lowering.

“I’m running towards nothing, again and again and again and again…”

Then there are the words. The line above may seem a clichéd bit of angst that would sound just as home on some emo disc. And it would. But there’s another side to them too…a glimpse of the random absurdity of existence (again, camus) and the notion of an endless, nameless return (nietzsche). to an anxious teen in Edmonton, Alberta, attending a private religious school, I suppose the lyrics tapped into some gloriously pleasurable darkness that I didn’t really have many ways to access.

Around this time I also started going to hardcore shows. And, well, I absolutely loved them. They offered a wild blast of mayhem and volume and a world I didn’t know but really wanted to. But hardcore also offered a pretty black-and-white stance, and sometimes I wanted grey.

Then I heard faith. And I got sucked in further.

The cover echoes the sound – a monochrome, blurry montage that feels like crawling through fog. Faith is austere, meditative and cold. It’s the sound of alone.

“in caves all cats are grey…”

“Primary” is the pop song, dark velvety funk. Listening to it again perfectly evokes an ‘80s sense of hip ennui (faith was released in 1981), yet if Interpol came out with it today, it would sound right. It’s dated, and it isn’t.

Faith is also a comedown album to match Bowie’s low. Grey is the perfect colour for the sleeve…it’s an interzone, strange and compelling, disconcerting yet comforting.

Any vestige of comfort was obliterated by pornography, released the following year. It boasts one of the best record sleeves ever – the figures of simon gallup, lol tolhurst and robert smith violently blurred beyond recognition, just a smear of malevolence bathed in overpowering blood red. It’s a mushroom trip gone horribly, vividly wrong. and make no mistake, this is a bad-trip album – and so it’s not too surprising, then, that stories abound about the cure descending into their own drugged-out dead ends whilst making pornography. Rarely has a cover been so indicative of the content.

And the title. perfect. A single word, dirty, filthy, illicit, an apt cipher of the sounds lurking in the grooves.

“it doesn’t matter if we all die…”

The first line of the first song on the first side pretty much sums it up. Again, just reading it, it comes across as impossibly trite, almost comic. But it’s backed up by a swirling maelstrom that makes the words hit so much harder and deeper. Pornography, after all, is the cure’s black masterpiece. it doesn’t matter if we all die, and smith means it.

the sound is HUGE on pornography, a precursor to the white light-heat-noise effect that was a signature of some of those lumped into the shoegaze scene – most notably my bloody valentine (there’s an aesthetic echo between the sleeves of pornography and mbv’s loveless), but also ride.

Smith had been bleak before, but on pornography he’s brutal. His voice has never sounded so twisted, wretched – sometimes howling, other times not so much bored by existence as hollowed out by it.

“is it always like this?” (again, nietszche’s eternal return…)

The final two tracks are stunning, in both senses of the word. “cold” is overpowering, a machine death dirge paired with frozen synths and a gorgeous, glowing guitar motif that engulfs everything. “your name like ice, into my heart.”

“pornography” is the end game, the final plunge into the abyss. It begins with the absurd, the insane – backward tape loops that haunt the edges of the entire track and then re-emerge as the final fucked-up farewell. The guitar is serrated, ugly, backed by tribal beats and a punishing drone arpeggio. Smith is angry and broken and desperate: “Another day like today and I’ll kill you…”

The rage ebbs, ambient noise engulfed by machine babble. madness.

“I must fight this sickness…find a cure…”

And well, the cure did find a cure. Or they found some sort of different direction. They decided to come up for some air and a bit of sunshine – or, at least, a moderately overcast climate. They had to, really – had the cure continued their current demonic descent (when does one really hit rock bottom?) they could have well beaten venom to the black metal punch.

The top, the next album, entered newish territory, still weird and dark…and yet lighter and, well, poppier (“caterpillar girl”). This pattern was perfected with the head on the door, followed by the sprawling psychedelia that defined the gorgeous double album kiss me kiss me kiss me.

And so, the circle works it way forward to disintegration – another gloom masterpiece. Yet here, smith is older, and he sounds, well, resigned – not fucking terrifying, like he does on pornography.

I’ve pretty much lost touch with the cure…the latest album I have is wish, which came out eons ago. Perhaps I should check out their newer offerings. I’ve a feeling that I’ll be disappointed though – not necessarily because of the music (although that might be the case), but simply because I don’t think they could hit me at this point in the same way that they did those many years ago.

But this isn’t just about nostalgia. I hadn’t dug out and listened to the cure’s defining trilogy in ages. Now, re-listening, those records remain utterly captivating, a great gloomy troika, lyrics emanating from my mouth that I hadn’t uttered in ages, like I’m speaking in tongues. Possessed, still.