The Cure – Songs of a Lost World – Album Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Curepedia: Author Q&A with DJ Set – Ballina Fringe Festival

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Interview with Simon Price – Part 1

Article for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Curepedia – Simon Price – Book Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

Goth – A History by Lol Tolhurst – Book Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

The Cure – 3Arena – Live Review – 1/12/22

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The Cure – Malahide Castle – Review

Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2019/06/10/the-cure-malahide-castle-review/

A Gateway to The Cure – Standing On A Beach

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https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2018/10/17/a-gateway-to-the-cure-standing-on-a-beach/

My Bloody Valentine – Meltdown Festival, London – Live Review

Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com

https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2018/06/25/my-bloody-valentine-meltdown-festival-london-live-review/

The Cure - Join the Dots: B-Sides & Rarities

FOUR CDs of b-sides from The Cure, great!  The set is broken up chronologically, and not surprisingly the first disc 1978-1987 is by far the most essential.  Any self-respecting Cure fan (Cure-head?) should already have creepy kitchen sink drama 10:15 Saturday Night already and the rest is a bit hit and miss.  The stronger tracks are earlier on the disc, with I'm Cold sounding like the darker moments of their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, while Another Journey by Train is like early single Jumping Someone Else's Train ran through a 17 Seconds blender, ie, pretty damn good.  Descent is like cast-off riffs from their Faith album and Splintered in Her Head could soundtrack a descent into hell.  After this the mood changes abruptly with the quirky likes of The Dream and The Upstairs Room, though the second version of Lament is a brooding slab of glorious misery.  What else?  Further into the first disc sees Robert Smith get looser and looser with his vocals, not always to great effect (the piercing wails on New Day).  The pacy guitar strums of The Exploding Boy are quite fetching though.

After this things get a bit wobbly.  On the second disc, A Chain of Flowers has some gorgeous, if very Goth-y, ringing guitars.  They turn their hand to poppy moments such as 2 Late and To The Sky is the Cure's very own John Hughes soundtracking moment, it wouldn't have been out of place in a mid 80s coming-of-age movie.  Other highlights include the Eastern flavoured Fear of Ghosts and two different covers of The Doors' Hello I Love You. Elsewhere, we could do without remixes of Icing Sugar, Hey You and Just Like Heaven, and the dance-infused Harold and Joe comes across as trying a bit too hard.

The third CD is by and large, accessible intelligent pop like This Twilight Garden and Halo, and darker brooding numbers like Play and the gentle grower that is The Big Hand.  We also get a couple of novelty covers, Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze and Bowie's Young Americans, along with Burn, taken from the soundtrack to The Crow.  The fourth CD isn't great really, some dreadful remixes (A Forest) and dodgy covers (World In My Eyes).  But overall, a decent collection.

The Cure - Wish

By 1992, The Cure were beginning to feel very 1980s, along had come 'Madchester', shoegaze and grunge, not to mention the rave scene.  Certainly by the time Wish, their ninth album was released not many of us were even thinking about Robert Smith and co. What is evident from first track Open is The Cure had amped up the guitars, they 'rock' a little more, but in a 'Cure-like' way.  High sees them on more familiar ground, a hummable, breezy tune. We also get the more immersive, glacial songs like Apart, which has wonderfully downbeat guitar lines you can just sink into, with the gorgeous, simple lyric "how did we get so far apart, we used to be so close together".  Later in the album, Trust and To Wish Impossible Things.

From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea has a bit of Stones and a bit of goth thrown together to make something that is, at seven and a half minutes, a bit much to be honest.  Wendy Time is a little 'quirky-Cure-by-numbers', not that there's anything wrong with that but it just feels like Smith could do this in his sleep.  Very hard to know what to say about Friday I'm In Love at this stage, but it seemed to press a lot of Cure buttons back in 1992 and is probably one of their most synonymous songs, and indeed casual fans would be hard pushed to name any more recent Cure songs.

Letter to Elise is an almost perfect distillation of Pictures of you, it would almost seem like a ripoff except that it's just so soothing, thanks mainly to some absolutely awesome guitar work.  In fact this could well be The Cure's guitar album. End is the last track, drenched in guitars it bookends the album nicely. While by no means a classic Cure album, there are enough good songs to carry this one through, so if you like this sort of thing, there's plenty to enjoy here.

Album Review: The Cure - Boys Don't Cry

Boys Don’t Cry was a sort of reworked version of The Cure’s debut album Three Imaginary Boys, and was released in early 1980.  It takes many of the better tracks from the debut and adds their first three excellent singles from 1979.  The packaging, like the music within, is quite rough and ready, with charmingly cheap looking artwork.

 

Unlike the material that followed, this album bristles with nervous, jerky energy.  Opening with the title track, which is possibly THE quintessential Cure song, and needs little description here.  10.15 Saturday Night oscillates between gentle, barely there guitar strumming and heavier guitar stabs, leading into Robert Smith’s searing guitar solo.  It’s probably best to avoid discussion of the emo-inventing “drip, drip, drip...” lyrics which don’t really stand up to scrutiny.  Jumping Someone Else’s Train and later Fire In Cairo are bouncy tracks with great melodies which rattle by pleasingly.

 

Debut single Killing An Arab, HEAVILY influenced by Camus has a vaguely Middle Eastern guitar riff and a hefty dose of attitude.  Later on the album, slower tracks such as Another Day and Three Imaginary Boys are moodier, wallowing tracks signposting the band’s direction on subsequent albums.  It’s an essential document of The Cure’s very early days.

Album Review: The Cure – Bloodflowers

The Cure took 4 years to follow up their weakest album Wild Mood Swings.  Here the mood swung towards gloom with 2000’s Bloodflowers.  Billed as the third in a trilogy incorporating 1982’s P0rn0gr@phy and 1989’s Disintegration, it was clear that no Love Cats or In Between Days would be found here.  The band set the bar high by referencing two of their classic albums.

In the main, the album doesn’t disappoint.  There are no real standout tracks.  What we have instead are lengthy, unhurried tracks featuring Robert Smith’s guitar prominently and some bleak lyrics.  It opens with Out of This World, which sets the tone for the album as Smith wearily sings lines like “we always have to go back to real lives” over sighing guitars and some almost chirpy keyboards.

Watching Me Fall is a full-on descent into darkness and despite some fine guitar, is the most overblown moment on the album at eleven minutes, matched only by Smith’s wail against the offset of old age on 39 (“the fire is almost out”).  But the prevailing mood on the album is not darkness, more a sort of wistful gloom over almost interchangeable tracks like Where The Birds Always Sing, Maybe Someday and The Last Day of Summer, all strummed guitars and washes of keyboards.

Doomed romance rears its ugly head in There Is No If… as Smith sings of “remember the first time I told you I love you, it was raining hard”… and “‘if you die’ you said, ‘so do I’ you said” over impossibly pretty guitars.  The Loudest Sound incorporates a trip-hop beat which remarkably doesn’t ruin the song, allowing Robert Smith to contribute some fine guitar lines.

In keeping with Cure tradition, proceedings are brought to a close with the title track, seven and a half minutes of descending guitars as only the Cure can quite pull off as Smith wails “these flowers will never die”.

The album captures an autumnal mood remarkably well, though avoid like the plague if you only like the Cure’s singles.

Album Review: The Cure – Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

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.