This weeks selections from The Cure’s 1989 album, Disintegration (which celebrated its 35th anniversary last week).
After what feels like a lifetime of listening to Disintegration, I can still vividly see the shower of golden sparks explode and slowly drift down when “Plainsong” hits the 0:25 mark, and the fact is, I still like too. It’s the first and last moment of unabridged rapture before 72 minutes of being in an emotional straitjacket with a blindfold on. It’s a crack of sunlight running through a blanket of grey skies and a tease that heaven is waiting for you after the trudge through hell. To this day I can’t help myself melodramatically miming the openers lyrics, replete with my turned-up collar cashmere coat and hands deep in my pockets on a bitter winter walk through the park.
I think it’s dark and it looks like it’s rain, you said
And the wind is blowing like it’s the end of the world, you said
And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead
And you smiled for a second
Atwood Magazine
Fascination Street
The Cure‘s early-Eighties albums Faith and Pornography firmly cemented leader Robert Smith’s reputation as rock’s premier prophet of gloom: Pornography began with the line “Doesn’t matter if we all die.” The first line of Disintegration — “I think it’s dark and it looks like rain” — isn’t quite as dire, but it is emblematic of the fact that while Disintegration doesn’t break new ground for the band, it successfully refines what the Cure does best. Even if his work no longer packs the shock value it once did, Smith has finally gotten things unequivocally, utterly and completely right.
The Cure’s previous album, the breakthrough Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, was a jaunty, genre-hopping overview of the band’s career; this follow-up is a bleak meditation containing few obvious singles. Every song is in a minor key, and cold, dark and drowning images pervade the lyrics.
In Smith’s world, even good relationships are shot through with morbid overtones, and failed ones are the end of the world; he treats both with the same resigned melancholy. Not coincidentally, the most upbeat song is also the shortest, and even then, “Lovesong” describes an only temporary respite from misery — “Whenever I’m alone with you/ You make me feel like I’m fun again,” Smith warbles. A bit of black humor passes for comic relief. The ironically titled “Lullaby” is a nifty reversal of the Who’s “Boris the Spider.” Leisurely and monumental, these songs glide by like ocean liners. Typically, many bars go by before the vocal comes in on top of a tide of droning lead bass lines and cunningly layered synths. Slow tempos drive serenely through the gaping spaces in the music — self-pity never sounded so good. A liner note tells the listener, “This music has been mixed to be played loud so turn it up.” At low volume, the record’s subtleties could blend into the woodwork; at high volume you’re helplessly drawn in. — Rolling Stone
Pictures of You
Robert Smith had been openly encouraging displays of male vulnerability from the get-go, starting with “Boys Don’t Cry” way back in 1979. Ten years later he was feeling vulnerable again because he was about to turn thirty and believed that all the great rock masterpieces were written before the composers exited their twenties. Though his hypothesis pretty much holds up (depending on how you define a masterpiece), I still thought his dread of turning thirty was a silly, culturally-induced overreaction until I read a quote of his published on Don’t Forget the Songs 365: “The essence of this album is the disgust concerning the loss of the ability to feel profound feelings when you grow older. That’s the disintegration I mean. I’m concerned about it, just as about everybody else I know of my age.” While I personally know several exceptions to that hypothesis, I do know a lot of people (especially those in business) who should be called out for this tendency in strong, Vonnegutian language: “You’ve crawled up your asshole and died!” Burdened with greed, debts, responsibilities and the nine-to-five, people tend to get serious, and when people get serious, their emotional range tends to shrink to include only reactive anger, frustration and exhaustion.
The approach of what he considered old age triggered Smith’s depression, which in turn gave his writing a sense of urgency peppered with pessimism. He felt very strongly that if he was going to write his magnum opus before the clock ran out he needed to move away from the pop orientation that marked most of the singles as well as the previous album (Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me) and play to his strengths instead. “Write about your experience, write about what you know,” says the archetypal English professor at the start of Creative Writing 101, and Robert Smith experienced the world through the dual lenses of emotional sensitivity and depression.
The result was Disintegration. Most critics (and Smith, to some degree) viewed the sonic flip-flop as a return to the sound of that goth classic, Pornography. Er . . . no. Pornography is an aggressive, in-your-face experience that never lets up; Disintegration is more reflective, more sonically diverse and frequently quite beautiful. As is often the case when attempting to establish atmosphere, the chords are relatively simple throughout, lightly enhanced through slight variants and different voicings. Though there will always be a tendency for some people to interpret Cure music through a unifocal lens of dour and morose, the songs on Disintegration feature a wide range of profound human emotions, and to appreciate that aspect of Disintegration, I would urge listeners to rid themselves of the belief that feelings have to be “either/or.” Haven’t you ever been happy and sad at the same time? Or excited and scared? Why do we cry when the movie has a happy ending? Disintegration is best appreciated when you can hold the notion of simultaneous opposing emotions. — AltRockChick
Lovesong
Mostly there was Disintegration: the record where Robert Smith approached turning 30, got engaged and then married, got annoyed with the way his band was working, and went off by himself to write something deep and serious. Disintegration does not “scatter.” It’s a single, grand, dense, continual, epic trip into core stuff the Cure did well. They’d always been good at this kind of album, too. If Kiss Me is a crowded, teeming city to explore, listening to Disintegration is more like standing in the middle of some vast, empty space—the kind of ocean or plain where you can see the horizon in all directions. You can sense that focus straight from the first minute, during which some wind chimes knock around in an empty void, and then the band bursts out with one of the most overwhelmingly grand openings I’ve ever heard on a pop record—a slow-motion, radiant synth figure of such scale that Sofia Coppola has plausibly used it to soundtrack the coronation of Louis XVI. [...]
This is the thing: The album has a reputation as some huge, dark, crushingly depressive experience. It’s not entirely unearned. If you want to be crushingly depressed with Disintegration, or frustrated, or self-loathing, it’ll embrace you right back. But it’ll embrace other things, too. A whole lot of this album’s appeal is that it’s comforting, practically womblike—big, warm, slow, full of beauty and melody and even joy. The trick, I think, is how well it serves as a soundtrack to that feeling that everything around you is meaningful, whether it’s beautiful or horrible or sublime: This is an album for capital-R Romantics, not sulkers. It’s muscular (like on the title track), wistful (“Pictures of You”), ghostly (“Closedown”), seething (“Fascination Street”), and yeah, morose, but what’s striking is how each of those qualities can reach really, really far into your gut. It’s not a record for the dead-inside: Get far enough into this album, and I will almost guarantee you will feel some shit.
It’s monolithic, and most of the songs work the same way. A lot of them are mostly “intro”: The steady pulse of bass and guitar underneath, while glacially huge synth lines and liquid guitar melodies sparkle through the foreground. After a while, Smith’s voice comes in, echoing calmly, surveying the ocean around him. On Kiss Me he yowled and croaked and had fun with it, but he spends the length of this album turning in tense, restrained performances, calm and steely and grave. The parts where he actually lets loose and starts raving are explosive. The title track, for instance, plunges further and further into a frustrated wail before climaxing on one phrase: “Both of us knew/How the end always is.” (You can take that climax as harrowing or cathartic or just plain fun.) Songs like this aren’t organized around parts and movements, just steady repetition and emotional build. So at some point you realize that the intros aren’t really “intros,” not just a period of waiting for things to start: sinking into the sound of this album—a sound whose every element feels huge and magnificent—is the whole point. — Pitchfork
Lullaby
Even in his unhappiest moments, though, Smith can’t quite shake off his genius ability to write brain-invading pop songs. So there’s no love cats or caterpillar girls here, but there is a spider man, who haunts musical bad trip ‘Lullaby’, a song that teeters between novelty and nightmare. And ‘Lovesong’, which even managed to reach the heights of number two in the Billboard charts in the US, is three-and-a-half minutes of lovelorn perfection.
But it’s the glorious, aching ‘Pictures Of You’ that really holds the whole thing together, Smith hurling nostalgia, regret and grief onto his creative bonfire, as the band conjure a glittering blizzard of sound behind him. Heartbreak has never sounded so enticing. [...]
Much has been written about the trying circumstances under which the album was recorded. Smith’s creeping fears about his own mortality and desire to create a special record clashed badly with co-founder Lol Tolhurst’s destabilising alcoholism. The former friends’ relationship had, well, disintegrated so entirely by the time the album was finished that Tolhurst’s contribution was famously reduced to the words “Other instrument” in the sleeve notes. Ouch.
Of course, whether a happy camp could have made ‘Disintegration’ seems unlikely. Knowing that it took its toll on its creators only makes it more special, especially when you consider that the likes of Ride, The Killers, DIIV and countless others would likely be very different bands now if it hadn’t have been for those fraught weeks Smith and co spent in the Oxfordshire countryside. — NME
Prayers for Rain
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