In 1987 The Cure were very much on the cusp
of something. Not that my peers believed it. They were more interested in U2,
so much so that the local HMV opened its doors at midnight so fans could buy
The Joshua Tree. A few months later, of much more importance to me was The
Cure's first ever double album - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. In fact it was the
first double album I ever bought.
Although it wasn't available at midnight I
bought it as soon as I could, to general disinterest from most people I knew.
Some Cure albums are very much a mood piece, Seventeen Seconds and Faith are
glorious slabs of gloom, while others are more skittish, flitting from mood to
mood (The Head on the Door). This album feels very much like a sum up of all
these facets. It opens with the squalling guitars of the somewhat heavy title
track, before giving way to the first slice of pop genius, Catch. It's an
effortlessly simple song, a breezy melody over a lyric about how Robert Smith
"used to sometimes try to catch her, but never even caught her name."
All dispatched in less than 3 minutes!
The hard-riffing Torture is slightly marred
by some 80s era brass (the Cure had a penchant for this in the mid to late
1980s) but this is followed by the gorgeous, narcoleptic ballad If Only Tonight
We Could Sleep, featuring what appears to be a sitar. It features a long
instrumental build up, beloved of their early 80s peak period, allowing the
track to unfold slowly and deliberately before Smith's idiosyncratic vocals
begin. Later this is taken a stage further on The Snakepit, which crawls along
sluggishly as Smith sings about "writhing in the snakepit" as the
band cook up an almost psychedelic atmosphere. It's the longest track here at
nearly seven minutes yet it drones on so pleasantly you don't want it to end.
Apart from some of the Cure's poppiest
moments (Why Can't I Be You, Hot Hot Hot and the irritating Hey You) the rest
of the material here can be divided into various 'types' of Cure songs. There
are classic Cure strumalong tracks such as How Beautiful You Are, the whimsical
The Perfect Girl and the towering Just Like Heaven. Although the latter borrows
from older Cure tracks such as In Between Days it's a really joyous Cure track,
with one of Robert Smith's classic jangly guitar riffs. There are also angrier
tracks All I Want, Icing Sugar, Shiver and Shake and Fight, showing a rockier
side to Smith's guitar playing. The first of these is probably the most
successful. Keyboards are prominent throughout the album, particularly on the
slow-paced, soaring One More Time and A Thousand Hours, a pair of brooders in
the vein of Faith.
It's a good album but it's hard to imagine
it as anyone's favourite Cure album, there are too many changes of mood, and,
well, too much music to digest here. Yet conversely it may be the Cure album
which represents the band best: they were never quite the morose goths of Faith
and Disintegration, nor the bouncy pop band of The Love Cats and Friday I'm In
Love but an amalgam of all of this and more besides.
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