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Rhino Re-Releases
With the assistance of Rhino Records, The Cure have started to re-release their catalog of albums. Each of them is remastered, with a bonus CD of rarities, live tracks and B-sides. If you like the band, you already know what to do. If you’re not sure what to think, that’s why I’m here. Following are reviews for the re-released versions of their 2nd, 3rd and 4th albums.
--Tom Ryan
SEVENTEEN SECONDS
Despite how popular and influential they have since become, it remains a fact that America missed a huge chunk of the Cure’s career. ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ got a lukewarm welcome in their home country Great Britain, but its release was delayed in the United States to see if any interest would be generated by any of the album’s tracks. When “Boys Don’t Cry” began to get some attention from college radio and the club scene, the album was finally released here. In typical fashion, the American record label changed the album title to “Boys Don’t Cry” so even twits could recognize it from the ‘hit’ song title. Despite first impressions, the Cure were not interested in becoming a ‘hit’ band, though. Although the songs were short, concise and succinct, they addressed topics that were light years away from pop song blather. The title song may have been somewhat trite, but “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” “Grinding Halt,” and “10:15 Saturday Night” were perhaps more memorable, and conveyed a refined sense of atmospherics. “Killing an Arab” even took its theme from “The Stranger” by Albert Camus.
For the second album, entitled ‘Seventeen Seconds’, the band decided to go further in this direction, and abandoned the ‘pop’ single mentality altogether. In America, the result was the sound of one hand clapping; the album wasn’t even released here, until A&M picked up the option and released it with the band’s third record, ‘Faith’, as a specially-priced double album, somewhat sarcastically titled “Happily Ever After”.
According to the informative liner notes that accompany the new CD package, singer/guitarist/main songwriter Robert Smith wanted the Cure to “connect” the sounds of Nick Drake (“Five Leaves Left”), David Bowie (“Low”), Jimi Hendrix (Isle of Wight”), Van Morrison (Astral Weeks”) and Khachaturian (Gayennah Ballet Suite”). Without a doubt, Robert Smith and Co. had high ambitions, especially for a band that appeared to know about seven chords. In this regard, I would surmise that they failed miserably (The Cure sound like Jimi Hendrix???? Ay-yi-yi), but they succeeded on other levels. The utter simplicity of the arrangements presented a sound that was almost barren, which provided the perfect foil for Smith’s stark, imagistic wordplay. A sullen mood pervades the entire album, but it is still somehow appealing, in a bleak sort of way.
The extra disk contains some songs that sound as though they were recorded inside a subway tunnel, but a few others are enlightening and enjoyable, from a historical perspective, The photos are a bit of a hoot, too, since we can see Robert Smith looking like a teenager without his bird’s nest hairdo or ghoul-on-holiday eye makeup. If you’re interested in Goth at its infancy, it doesn’t get much younger than this.
GRADE: B
FAITH
While ‘Seventeen Seconds’ was dark, ‘Faith’ is pitch black. ‘Seventeen Seconds’ may have been sullen, but ‘Faith’ is downright bleak. For all of that, it’s also a slightly better album than its predecessor. Singer/songwriter Robert Smith was getting very good at expressing depression, even when it was painfully over wrought (I’m sorry, but every time I hear him singing about ‘crying at the funeral party’, I have a perverse desire to laugh out loud). ‘Faith’ was the perfect record to play if you felt incapable of crying but wanted to experience your depression anyway. It offers eight dirges, each one capturing a different nuance of catatonic pain. The naïve but appealing simplicity of “Boys Don’t Cry” (their first album) is further expanded on here, but with some subtle and yet very significant changes. Words are boiled down to almost nothing, while the music provides atmospherics that fill in the moody blanks. For effect, somebody spent a hundred bucks on a flanger pedal, and quite obviously must have liked it, since it appears on virtually every song here, along with tons of echo and reverb.
For all of the atmospherics, though, the real mood setter is Robert Smith’s voice; never in the history of recorded music has someone sounded so distracted, doleful, and depressed. He makes late-era Billy Holiday sound like Mary Poppins. I could be judgmental and claim that the album contains only eight songs due to a lack of songwriting ideas, but I think it is more due to the fact that they simply could not bring themselves to edit the chord progressions. Many songs build for over two minutes before vocals enter, but this only adds to the hypnotic appeal of the depressing themes. This utterly simple (or mind-numbingly redundant) game plan results in a record that is, for better or worse, extremely consistent in content, and in mood.
The extra disk (and extra track on disk one) is even creepier – and somehow even simpler in structure - than the main album. The audio quality for some of it sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom…underwater. Most tunes consist of a few repetitive, hypnotic chords, making time slow down like some musical version of Einstein’s theory of relativity. “Carnage Visors” does this for thirty full minutes, with no vocal.
The fact is, you already know if you like the Cure or not. “Faith” captures them at a point in time when they completely abandon commercial acceptance and leap headlong into cult status. If you’d like to know where stylized gloom developed, then you’ve come to the right place.
GRADE: B
PORNOGRAPHY
Imagine how you would feel if somebody fed you a handful of barbiturates, tied your behind your back, and then held the spinning blades of a screamingly loud gas-powered lawnmower up to your face. That is the sound of ‘Pornography’. On this album, the atmospherics of previous albums melt into chaos, until nothing is left but the brain-numbing hum of impending death. I could scream, if only I weren’t so bored.
‘Pornography’ is the Frankenstein version of ‘Faith’ and “Seventeen Seconds’. It takes all of the bits that made those albums interesting and good, and renders them into something monstrous and hideous. Robert Smith decided to cloister himself away for most of this record, and without guidance or sage input from his cohorts, he takes things way too far in the wrong direction. Comprised of relentlessly pounding drums and virtually no melodic content, ‘Pornography’ is the sound of Robert Smith ripping out his own hair while on downers. The resultant hairdo would remain, but the sound had to go. On subsequent albums, he would retain the ‘phantom-of-the-opera-with-a-bad-hangover’ look, but would abandon all attempts to recreate anything resembling this unholy racket. Eventually, he would begin to write genuine pop songs like “Let’s Go to Bed”. Meanwhile, we had to suffer with him.
If you are a true masochist, then you will love the extra rarities disk, since it contains a thirteen-minute track called “Airlock” that consists of nothing but atonal noise. The rest of the rarities consist of live and/or alternate versions of the album tracks, which serve as little more than a precursor to the hell they eventually yield. While parts of ‘Faith’ might have sounded like it was recorded underwater, this collection makes me wish that someone would just throw a toaster into the tub. Unbearably bleak, relentlessly annoying, and yet somehow anemic, “Pornography” sounds like Trent Reznor after a bloodletting.
GRADE: D+
 
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