POV: Cure B-sides!

New Day
Play
Stop Dead
Fear of Ghosts
Just One Kiss

"Babble" -- the weird creepy start, yes, but that cascading keyboard is beautiful, one of Roger O'Donnell's best contributions to the band over the years, and Smith is on freakin' fire with his vocals - desperation, anger, frustration, rage.

"A Man Inside My Mouth" -- my god, it's so perfectly weirdly dorky and not at the same time. Weird/wonderful bassline from Simon G. and then that keyboard bit.

"This Twilight Garden" -- song = atmosphere = title. I really can't put it any better than that so I won't.

"Split Milk" -- okay, so it's not a B-side per se, a web-only download from Bloodflowers days, but that counts. Robert turns the tables on the assumptions that he only talks/thinks about adolescent states of mind and contemplates the various roads not taken from shifting points of view -- quite honestly and easily one of the best lyrics he's ever done. It does not hurt at all that the music is excellent, very much not a Bloodflowers arrangement in sound.

"Harold and Joe" -- such a perfect contrast to "Never Enough," low key and softly spiky. And I'll leave it at that.

(Honorable mention to "2 Late", "Harold And Joe", "Home", "It Used To Be Me", "A Man Inside My Mouth", and "A Chain Of Flowers".)

2 Late
A Japanese Dream
Breathe
Hello I Love You (Psychedelic)
Snow in Summer

"Splintered In Her Head" - This track is all about percussion and tritones. It's an effective way to aurally suggest harrowing paranoia.

"Lament" - Those flute wails! That guitar line! The echo effects on the vocals! Etc.

"New Day" - Someone described this as proto trip-hop. I love that description. This track is all about the hollow arrangement and the emptiness signifiers inherent in that.

"A Japanese Dream" - This is all about the bassline and that FUCKING EXCELLENT CHORUS.

"This Twilight Garden" - Another gorgeous arrangement, another gorgeous chorus, some fantastic wordsmithing/verse unification in the lyrics.

Well I excuse you, of course. ;-) I just wanted to break up the usual 'list and leave it at that' flow.

Okay, fair enough....

1. "Babble" - Returns to the bleak and vengeful side of The Cure (after basking in their poppier, more commercial aspects for far too long), re-establishing Smith as one irritable motherfucker. Bonus points of Simon Gallup's fuck-off-and-die bass battery and the deliberately incongruous and slightly disquieting baby sample (the same that would appear in Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody" a decade later? Ask Timbaland, a closet New Wave/Alternative freak.) Starting like a drunken rendition of "Blue Jay Way" while an infant vomits behind a dumpster, Robert emerges from his fetal position and rips into you for the miserable shit that you are!

2. "I'm Cold" - Dipped like a rancid dollop of spoiled meat in a fondue of passive indifference and revulsion, and augmented with an otherworldly echo effect that sounds like Robert's inner voice dictating the perfect lines to crush a girl's spirit, "I'm Cold" is chilly kiss-off and a potent cocktail of disdain.....absolutely gorgeous in its cruelty.

3. "A Few Hours After This" - Those splendid strings and booming bass drums breaking over the hills like a dazzling, brilliant sunrise....this is the Cure at their most ebullient (offsetting the black-hearted spite of my first two choices). First heard this courtesy of the Standing on A Beach cassette (which featured b-sides on the...er...b-side) while on a bicycle trip through Europe in 1987. Something about the mixture of the Cure's untethered romanticism mixed with the verdant French countryside in summer merged seamlessly.

4. "Man Inside My Mouth" - There's just something so freaky and intriguingly wrong about this track -- the perfectly spritely pop bounce matched to an eyebrow-arching narrative about gender confusion and unwitting fellatio?

5. "The Exploding Boy" - It's all about that bass.

what can you say? they bored the heck out of me in the 90s but of any 80s band they went in the most directions and often did it as well as anyone: tracks that stand up to early pil, early cocteaus, early new order, late depeche mode and maybe prince.

I think people need to re-evaluate the post-'89 b-sides.

"This Twilight Garden" = well written, well sung and texturally much more interesting then all of Wish (save for "To Wish Impossible Things".)

"2 Late" = a bit overrated, but still pretty great, I don't think there's anything left to say about this.

"Spilt Milk" = what Ned said. It's better than anything on Bloodflowers except "Out Of This World" and "There Is No If", and it's the first tastefully restrained arrangement he's done since Wish. Pretty cathartic lyrics.

"The Exploding Boy" = almost as catchy as the a-side, with more endearingly ridiculous keyboards.

1. La Ment (Flexi Pop) : Considerably more lo-fi in its sonics than the version released on "Japanes Whispers", this one always does it for me for all out melancholy creepiness. The flutes, that flailing drum machine pattern and all the echo - as Dan mentioned upthread - along with RS's almost unintelligible vocal in one of their messiest mixes and you have a Cure track that shouldn't work but , boy, it does. The more polished version is just pretty by comparison.

2. A Japanese Dream : I remember getting the "Why Can't..." 12'" upon release and flipping immediately to hear what the B-side was like, as was my habit back in the day. I didn't expect this: manic temple bells, the bassline, that drum pattern and dark synth chords and the effects on RS's voice during the chorus...just about everything is right with this one. Tremendous.

3. A Few Hours After This : Always loved the bombasticness of the track with the uber-swoony RS vocal floating on top.

4. Exploding Boy

The Upstairs Room - Excepting Faith, late 1982-83 is my favourite era of The Cure. This is just such a weird pop song. I love the guitar sound during the chorus. The chorus is catchy as fuck. Odd lyrics.

The Exploding Boy - How did this go from being the title track of the Cure's 1985 LP to being "thrown away" on a b-side? I'm happy to see it listed so many times above. It's truly an exhilarating pop song - and the bassline ROXX.

2 Late - I was surprised to see so many people rate this one. That gently descending chord progression is irresistable and the guitar solo (6-string-bass solo?) is so perfect - simple and perfect.

Halo - Another fab bassline. Nice chimey guitar. This is arranged so nicely - I love the way it builds to and through the chorus. Dreamy.

"Lament" / "La Ment" ("The Lies") - I sort of feel like "Lament" can't count, it was an A-side on the flexi, it was part of an EP - added to which Japanese Whispers has always been in print - and it's one of Smith's widely-acknowledged creative high points. Nevertheless, this is one of my POVs for the entire Cure catalog, so it's got to stick in here. The live version from Glastonbury 1990 is a life-changer for any Cure fan. Would I trade the five or six good songs recorded since Boris left for an unassailable reputation? In a heartbeat.

"A Japanese Dream (extended)" - The abortive 7" single mix of this one makes me angrier than a thousand Wild Mood Swings. The robo-gated "Burning like a monkey" and flanged drum solo outro...too funky.

"The Big Hand (post-Disintegration ?instrumental)" - They teased us with the pre-Wish sitar version of this over the Picture Show credits; it still hasn't been released in its entirety - I resorted to mixing a 4:30 version looping the verse and chorus together a few times. If he'd put some "Fear of Ghosts"-style mumbling lyrics over this, it'd be the perfect finale to the 80s. Instead, we get the warbling, operatic b-side to "A Letter to Elise", hydrochloric acid in my ears.

"Harold and Joe" - The Cure discover ecstasy, fashion a 5-minute slice of it.

let's make this more interesting:

POO Cure b-side from 1996+ (basically, the last 3 songs on disc 3 of Join The Dots + disc 4)

Counting all the other tracks around as well, "Spilt Milk" by a mile.

lol I kind of forgot there were 2 albums after Join the Dots

I even revived this because I am currently listening to "This Morning"

1996 is pretty much the year I stopped listening to new Cure stuff so I got nothing. That's around when Wild Mood Swings came out, right?

However this thread has prompted me to relisten to "Babble" for the first time in too long so I thank you. "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP...AND LET ME BREATHE!"

yep

WMS isn't a good album but the b-sides from that era are still great ("Adonis", "Ocean", "It Used To Be Me", "Home", "Waiting", "A Pink Dream")

the b-sides from 2004 are also fantastic ("Fake", "This Morning", "Going Nowhere", "Why Can't I Be Me?", "Your God Is Fear")

"Why Can't I Be Me?"

wait

really?

LOL!

haha yeaah, it's basically the opposite of "Why Can't I Be You?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBUHjIZ4ayg

(I'm trying to pick between "This Morning", "Home", "Ocean", "All Kinds Of Stuff" and "It Used To Be Me")

"2 Late" is an absolutely perfect song and while i totally get why it wasn't on disintegration, i kinda wish we'd gotten a version of disintegration where it would have made sense on it

I think that’s The Head on the Door

One of the best B-side bands.

I remember seeing Flight of the Navigator a long time ago and thinking how weird it was that they used 'The Man Inside My Mouth' on the soundtrack, thinking about it recently - because of a documentary - and doubting myself, I went back and checked, it wasn't actually the Cure song but a close parody, made for what reason, I do not know.

From IMDB

"When MAX and David stop behind the car to ask for directions, the song heard in the car is a fragment of "Trapped In My Mind", an obvious parody of The Cure's "A Man Inside My Mouth" composed by David Kitay and Guy Moon, and performed by Kitay himself specifically for the movie. A full version of the song does not exist."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCdLKYUIeno