The Cure: Classic or Dud?

Anything to add, Ned?

The idea is to encourage people to be forthright in their opinion but it's not a vote or anything. It's a catchier way of saying "what do you think of this band?"

Cheers!

(PS: Dud. A couple of the singles are nice musically, even very good, but they have Smith's horrible smeared moan over the top of them. He sounds like a fourteen-year-old with a splinter in his toe: there's something wheedling about his voice which makes me want to smack him and tell him to get a grip rather than empathise with him.)

Seriously.. though it seems the norm to slag 'em off these days, it's amazing just how much good stuff they have done. 'Boy's Don't Cry'/'3 Imaginary Boys' is a great debut, whichever version you have. Scratchy wired glum-pop. In fact it's all classic up to 'The Top', their first major clunker.

'Head on the Door' is great pop. 'Kiss Me X3' is also great pop ('Just Like Heaven'), except where they try too hard to make great pop and fail ('Hot, Hot, Hot'). 'Disintegration' is their last great album. But not pop. No problem.

My last encounter with The Cure was 'Wild Mood Swings'. I swung my copy back from whence it came - Record and Tape Exchange. Still, 'Galore' sums up the later years nicely.

Anyway I like old Bob, a pop man at heart even in his gloomiest moments.

Classic. And if you disagree with me I'll shove all twenty or so CDRs of rare and odd stuff I have of theirs down your throat and kill you. *proceeds to light candles to huge _Disintegration_ poster in room*

The Cure are a band who, like Depeche Mode and a number of others of that ilk, should have just hung it up on December 31, 1989. Their glory days were in the 1980s, Disintegration should have been their last album. It would have been a perfect ending. Instead, they chose to put out three subpar releases in the 1990s. While Bloodflowers was a definite improvement over Wild Mood Swings (did *anyone* like that album?) and Wish (which came out at the peak of my Cure fandom and still disappointed me), it still wasn't close to the material they released during the 1980s.

Yeah, some of their stuff is whiny and pretentious. But I think they manage to pull it off reasonably well, and I think the whininess and the pretentiousness will make them staples of every sad-sack high school kid for the next thirty years, whether they continue to release new albums or not. (And hopefully they won't, judging from the poor quality of their most recent albums--I think that the more bad stuff they release, the less "legendary" they'll become.)

By the way, I *was* a teenage goth girl. I was also an early-20s goth girl. I own a velvet and lace cape and little pointy boots and black lipstick. Heh.

_Wild Mood Swings_ is more problematic. It's a very erratic album and contains a couple of songs that never should have seen the light of day ("Mint Car", "Return"). However, it also contains the absolutely marvelous "The 13th", "Want", "Gone!" and "Jupiter Crash". Some judicious editing (and swapping some album tracks for b-sides) would make this a much better album.

For me, _Bloodflowers_ compares very well to their 80's output. It seems that the group got back into a good songwriting groove for this album, which is particularly evident on "Out Of This World", "The Loudest Sound", "The Last Day Of Summer", "Bloodflowers", and "Watching Me Fall" (Cure cliches and all). The album has a strong sense of flow and there are no embarrassing attempts to rewrite "Friday I'm In Love". It was a good ending for them, assuming that Robert's latest pronouncements about the band's demise are actually true this time.

There are individual songs I don't like, and _Wild Mood Swings_ is easily my least- favorite of their albums, but I'd be hard-pressed to say that I actively dislike any of the Cure's albums.

They have many good tunes. However, they have many bad ones, viz "Friday I'm In Love".

Still, at their best they show an impressive ability to make both poppy goth jumpathons and total doomfests.

I had a girlfriend once who was into these boys hard and she used to play is it 'Pictures of You' (?) over and over and over (a sort of pining for a lost love I think; not me, incidentally). Anyway, it used to bore the hell out of me, not to mention what felt like a large hole in my brain.

The thing is, with the Cure, it's like the Manic Street FUCKING Preachers syndrome - people who like 'em don't just like 'em, they fucking LOVE 'em, and think they're prophets or something. No, they are miserable, half-goths with absolutely nothing to say and even less charisma.

That said, I am admit that I am hardly familiar know their canon, since I can't bear exposure to it for protracated periods.

Still; DUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUDUD

Hmm, having said that, I do get riled when someone fails to 'get' my favourite bands and indulges in the kind of mindless attack I have already posted against The Cure. Yet, I feel that certain bands are wont to attract a more dependent following, who hang the band's music like metaphorical rosaries. And I'm not sure that even among my most beloved artists, there are those which I could hold in such equally mindless esteem.

What say you?

DUD

Yet I do wonder how much my own nosatlgia plays a role. I still think Wish is great, despite every. review. ever. written. Maybe if I hadn't listened to it for the 1st time as a teenager travelling thru Europe with schoomates I'd think differently.

Also, I really really like the Wolfgang Press song on _Lonely is an Eyesore_, but I've heard their recordings are pretty patchy. Any recommendations there?

the "cure=suburbia" part of Michael Bracewell's England Is Mine is one of the best things ever!

Classic, BTW. Again, my mid-teens coincided with Disintegration and I was full-on obsessed for a couple of years. I bought a shedload of albums at Oxfam last year, and a friend and I drove our GF/wives insane by listening, back to back, to 17 Seconds, Faith, Pornography and the Top. Divorce was on the horizon by the end of that evening.

Thing is, there are SO many B-sides and rarities which have officially surfaced that they'd have to put out a box set. As it is, if the remasters that are surfacing next year are going to include bonus discs for each with room for other oddities, then that will partially settle the problem.

I think most* of the Wish b-sides are their best material, particularly “This Twilight Garden” and “The Big Hand”

(Yes I am excluding “A Foolish Arrangement”)

Disintegration was the high water mark, saw them live finally and it was amazing, and I was beyond excited for the next album and then they released fucking Mixed Up which pissed me off.

a live album exclusively of songs from Disintegration which delighted you?

I'm in Texas, so Entreat wasn't really available to me at the time... didn't even know it existed

sic, should we give you a pedant's corner thread where you can issue corrections to your heart's content while the rest of us chat about things elsewhere? It might make all of us happier.

i was an impressionable little kid when i was lucky enough to see the disintegration tour, still one of my favorite shows ever. the first time i ever saw two men make out in public!

The only thing that pissed me off about Mixed Up is that they put a bunch of remixes of Disintegration singles that I already owned on it, which is why the “Pictures of You” dubstravaganza is my favorite of those singles and rivals the re-recorded “The Walk” remix and the “Inbetween Days” remix as my favorite tracks on the album.

Well actually also I was pissed off by the remix of “The Caterpillar” that was just 100% unnecessary

(and anyway even if sic hadn't got his facts wrong about the US album release order and Entreat had been released here, or I'd happened across an imported copy, a live album would have annoyed me as much as Mixed Up, I wanted an album of NEW material)

I absolutely bought an import copy of Entreat at the time but that really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone

I had a bootleg recording of the Houston Prayer tour show on two cassettes which served the purpose!

Felt like a blending of the drive and consistent sonic approach of Disintegration with the variety and melodics of Kiss Me and Head at the time, and probably still would if I listened to them in order. Elise is the only boring song on it, and I might never have noticed if it had stayed on the back half of the album.

I don’t know why anyone’s bothering to post when Ned has affirmed that my personal teenage reactions are 100% factual

I feel the Wish period 91-92 saw them record some of their best material (the early versions of songs we got to hear on Play Out, the b-sides) but then the actual album they put out was mostly subpar retreads of better songs

hi i love wish, and this revive is good. djp otm!

(except ahhh c'mon, "foolish arrangement" is a fun simon smasher!)

i also like to be pedant in my own way, so it’s fun for me to post how robert recycled "uyea sound" from the lost wishes ep into "underneath the stars."

and "underneath the stars" makes me think of something and that something seems like a bad idea, so i'm not gonna do it, BUT―
i've always wanted to poll "worst cure album" here. i think this is probably the most diverse cross-section of cure fans i've ever encountered online. i love this band so much, and there's been a few of their albums through the years where i've been sat there listening and just thought, "man i know they can do better than this. i've heard them." but i still have, and play physical copies of all of them. i still choose to listen to what i have acknowledged is someone's worst, and maybe even objectively bad, music. it's something i've been thinking about for a while, not just with the cure. anyway. i won't do it, but if i did, it would be because i simply can't get enough.

NEVER enough, one might say.

f. hazel’s feelings on “Wish” upthread reflect mine to a tee. Hated “Mixed Up” as well. Remember wondering what the hell were they thinking when they released that.

I watched The Cure in Orange for the first time last year, and hearing Robert Smith do all the guitars and play extended guitar workouts made me think we missed out on never getting a “Robert Smith: Guitar God” Cure album.

It's implied.

(Also Pearl was in the lineup there so it wasn't JUST RS.)

Yikes, you’re right. I remembered him being on keyboards, but doing a quick scan of the video, he was on guitar more than I thought. Still, I think watching the movie was the first time I really thought of Robert Smith as an accomplished guitarist, because I never really think of The Cure as a “guitar band”, where the instrument is the focus of the sound.

rs being a secret guitar hero was one of the big pleasures of my 1980s/90s cure fandom - like you Roby, I remember watching In Orange and realising how much cool stuff he was doing and mind blown that this guy i already thought was awesome was actually throwing out these killer solos or texturally cool parts

yeah until about a decade ago I assumed Thompson handled the lead lines.

Anyway, speaking of The Cure in Orange, live screening in SF tonight with Lol Tolhurst. (Would like to be there but I have a show planned.)

https://www.4-star-movies.com/calendar-of-events/lol-tolhurst-in-orange

So what are Robert's best guitar god moments?

I do love the hell out of "The Kiss"

Absolutely nothing they’ve done was as much of a misfire as Wild Mood Swings. The wheat to chaff ratio on that is just completely off.

That said, I would argue that “Us or Them” off of the s/t is the worst post-imperial period song they’ve ever done* by miles but it’s on a much better overall album, particularly once you include the extra tracks from the Japanese release

* I am nothing if not consistent

I mean, the Banshees recruited him for his guitar in 1983, so he must've had a rep already

Well, he'd already played with them; famously he was drafted in on guitar when they fired John McKay and Kenny Morris on tour in 1979 because the Cure were already the opening band.

I very much prefer Wild Mood Swings to anything that came after it save Songs for a Lost World

Speaking of Wish, Bob's guitar hero moment is the solo on Deep Green Sea.

I think his solo in Bloodflowers (the song) is great and pretty much makes the track

Some of my favourite RS guitar parts are his less "rocky" solos - like A Forest, or Faith, or Like Cockatoos, or If Only Tonight... or even that great bit in A Strange Day

I would argue that “Us or Them” off of the s/t is the worst post-imperial period song they’ve ever done

I am actually kinda partial to this song! I get that the lyrics are wonky but it is heartfelt and I quite dig the music, it was really strong when I saw it on that non-keyboards tour

Worst album poll on here would surely be a cointoss between the S/T and 4:13 Dream, decided solely by Dan’s vote for the former

Well, he'd already played with them; famously he was drafted in on guitar when

sheesh Ned, take it to the pedant thread

Many, many times I've been in awe of Smith ripping it up on guitar - "Fire in Cairo", "A Forest", "M", "Other Voices", "The Figurehead", "Give Me It". On so many songs of the trio albums his guitar lines are both rhythm and melody, absolutely mesmerising. I hear it in Nilifur Yanya's playing, almost quotations, Dry Cleaning, a lot of the contemporary guitar music I love, which isn't a coincidence!

Ah true. You’re totally right on Dry Cleaning. Hadn’t made that connection before

The two Cure guitar tunes I love are "Jumping Someone Else's Train" and "The Kiss". "The Kiss" is like heavy metal Prince with that drum sound.

I was just listening to Kiss Me… and I think “The Snakepit” is a good example of why Smith was always a “guitar hero hiding in plain sight” to me. The song has a really strong, unique guitar part, but halfway through, where you’d expect a guitar solo to come in with a guitar driven song, woodwind and keyboard parts start weaving their ways into the music. But, unlike a guitar solo, neither becomes the focus of the song once they arrive, they remain these insidious sounds that rise and fall as they’re needed to within the context of the music. By the end of the song, I’m thinking more about these parts then I am about Smith’s guitar part that carried the first half of the song.

Well put.

I think it's partly because as good (as needed) as Smith is as a guitarist, he's an excellent arranger. Especially a lot of these repetitive droney songs of this era, he generally finds a way to keep things interesting. Little licks and flourishes here and there.

More than Smith-the-guitarist we need to talk about Smith-as-producer.

And/or David M. Allen. And Mike Hedges (who I always get confused with Mike Thorne, who might have also been a good choice for those early albums).

I regard Allen as the guy who handled the tapes and the mixing board.

Could be! There are a few moving parts, but it may also be more than a coincidence that the band started to trip itself up after he was gone. That's why Jimmy Page mostly made sure to pick a different engineer for every Zeppelin album, so that he always got (reputational) credit for the production.

That's fair.

Allen had a strong hot streak there (among other productions, First And Last And Always plus Strange Times by the Chameleons).

and Book of Days.

True!

I think Allen had a pretty strong influence (even though he might not have a personal sound signature) - his departure and the fact RS started getting lazy on production and arrangement explains why the songs got much less interesting from 1992 onwards

Meantime:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-cure-hint-new-album-in-the-works-1235448487/

The band’s official website updated its lengthy bio section in recent weeks, with fans noticing one especially noteworthy sentence added to the career-spanning write-up: “In March 2025 the band went back into Rockfield Studios to record 13 more songs for a follow up album.”

Additionally, the bio noted that Smith also went “back into the studio to help reedit and remix The Show of a Lost World film …,” which is likely the in-the-works concert film of a November 2024 performance at London’s Troxy, where they performed Songs of a Lost World in its entirety as well as other Cure classics.

“In March 2025 the band went back into Rockfield Studios to record 13 more songs for a follow up album.”

lol

"...they're still recording them now!"

Looking forward to this album in 2040

Just need to finish recording a couple of vocals and we’re done

I wonder tho - RS has talked about feeling he doesn’t have all that much time as a performing artist left, and the rapturous reception for SOALW must do a lot for his confidence in putting something out.

lol wasn't the follow-up supposed to have been nearly complete before songs of a lost world was released? my only hope is that the mix & master is less horrendous

I think Allen had a pretty strong influence (even though he might not have a personal sound signature)

idk i think he did have a pretty clear sound signature, that classic run of albums all have the same sound to them that the later albums departed from (for the worse)