Old Cure for new ills

My brother and I love The Cure. My brother says he prefers exploring the brightly lit pop parlors in Cure songs where boys don’t cry and do fall in love on a Friday (or in between days, for that matter). I prefer the cold, violet Cure universe littered with hanging gardens, figureheads, funeral parties, Siamese twins and drowning men. My brother digs Robert Smith (The Cure’s driving force) singing about cute caterpillars and hands that shake like milk. I dig Robert Smith with haloes on his moon, gloom in his heart and gun in his hand. But of course, writing consistently within The Cure cosmology, I have no brother who loves The Cure. It occurs to me that I’m talking solely about myself – someone who loves the schizoid sides of The Cure, both shadows and light, both love-cat phase and gray-cat phase, both daffy Cure and deathly Cure. Anyway, a schizophrenic band like The Cure deserves a schizophrenic listener in each of us.

Dear readers, to label The Cure as a purely Goth rock band (or, conversely, a Top 40 alt rock band) would be totally inaccurate. Robert Smith – teased hair, lipstick, white makeup, cadaver clothes and all – and his morose associates are more than that. Yes, Smith dabbled into the prose of Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and all the other shiny happy people of Existential Literature, but he’s not a one-dimensional chap like the great Ian Curtis. Nowhere in the Joy Division canon does the surly Curtis sing, "We’re so wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty/Oh you know I’d do anything for you," or "If I only I thought of the right words/I wouldn’t be breaking apart all my pictures of you." Robert Smith is a romantic, the Frank Sinatra of the doomed.

The Cure as a unit is versatile, hard to pigeonhole. Musically, you could hear angular post-punk riffs in songs like Boys Don’t Cry and Fire in Cairo, and atmospheric, textural guitars and synthesizers in Pictures of You and Prayers for Rain. AC/DC, The Cure is not.

In terms of lyrics, the themes of absurdity and alienation abound in Cure songs. I submit a few lines from 10:15 Saturday Night:

And I’m crying for yesterday

And the tap drips

Drip drip drip drip drip drip drip

It’s always the same

Also, from The Funeral Party:

Two pale figures

Ache in silence

Timeless

In the quiet ground

Side by side

In age and sadness

Or our dear old friend Desolation from Grinding Halt:

No light

No people

No speak

No people…

Everything’s coming to a grinding halt…

Also, from The Drowning Man:

One by one her senses die

The memories fade

And leave her eyes

Still seeing worlds that never were

And one by one the bright birds leave her...

Numerous are the references to death: "A sound like a tiger thrashing in the water/Thrashing in the water/Over and over/We die one after the other…" (One Hundred Years); "In books/And films/And in life/And in heaven/The sound of slaughter/As your body turns…" (Pornography); "Sing out loud/We all die/Laughing into the fire…" (Siamese Twins); or anything in The Cure’s bleakly beautiful "Disintegration."

Yes, even if my "brother" prefers seeing Robert Smith with big hair and postmortem pallor, fumbling in stupid hi-tops and singing the post-punk English equivalent of Isang Linggong Pag-ibig (read: Friday, I’m In Love), my dark heart yearns for old Cure songs – the ones that make listeners feel "stone-white, so delicate, lost in the cold." Songs that could compel a young Czech to kill himself in a toilet in the middle of a Cure concert under a cloud of brutal gloom. A true story.

Goth’s Not Dead

Why the write-up about Robert Smith and The Cure, which follows on the heels of a Morrissey and The Smiths article two Fridays ago? (By the way, around three people sent me an e-mail after reading my article "The Man With A Thorn In His Side." Only three people cared about one of the most significant bands of the ‘80s, while space-fillers about the Eddie Gil/Madame Auring love team get loads. Disappointing.) Why The Cure? Because the band has a new album out and Robert Smith’s work on this planet is far from done.

It’s hard to believe that The Cure released its first album "Three Imaginary Boys" in ’79 – the era of punk, disco and quasi-symphonic rock. The band followed it up with the dark, bleak trilogy "Seventeen Seconds" (’80), "Faith" (’81) and "Pornography" (’82). These three records have influenced such diverse acts like the Deftones and Interpol.

"Seventeen Seconds" is morose and minimalist, spawning The Cure’s first hit A Forest. "Faith" was created in an environmental cocktail of drugs, isolation and deaths in families. The album is so bereft of hope, Smith reportedly finished the vocals feeling "incredibly empty." Some songs in "Pornography" were cut in a toilet to get that dirty, grimy feeling. And when the band-members toured in support of the album, they smeared their eyes with lipstick so that when they sweated it looked as if their eyes were bleeding. And oh, Smith lifted song titles from Kafka.

"Japanese Whispers" (’83) is nothing like that trio of aural doom. It features ridiculously cheerful singles Let’s Go To Bed and The Lovecats (the Disney song for Goths). Smith called them pieces of "idiot pop" (which is probably more applicable to 10,000 covers from acoustic guitar-wielding Paolo Santos and Jimmy Bondoc).

"Head on the Door" (’85) was Smith’s attempt to make "Strawberry Fields-style pop music." It contains the hits Close to Me and In Between Days. "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" (’87) is sprawling and schizophrenic. It cemented Smith’s reputation as a pop sorcerer with hits Just Like Heaven and Catch.

"Disintegration" (’89) followed. It features epic, sweepingly melancholy keyboards and elliptical lyrics about breakups, ageing, dying and disintegrating. Dig the line:

I leave you with photographs

Pictures of trickery

Stains on the carpet and

Stains on the memory

Songs about happiness murmured in dreams

When we both of us knew

How the end always is

How the end always is…

It also contains Pictures of You, the love song with just the right amount of menace (and my all-time favorite Cure tune). While recording songs for "Disintegration," Smith reportedly took a monkish vow of silence. It was an unnerving experience for the band.

Other noteworthy Cure albums are "Wish" (’92) and "Bloodflowers" (2000), a collection of long dirges and five-minute-plus opuses. Both announced by Smith as The Cure’s "last." Yeah, right.

In Between Daze

The latest record simply titled "The Cure" is characterized by a heavy mental wall-of-noise, almost unbecoming of The Cure. Not surprising since Smith’s co-producer is nü-metal knob-twister Ross Robinson (Korn, Limp Bizkit), who tried to convince the band to pursue a heavier terrain while other acts opt to stay in the garage. Robinson wanted The Cure to make a dark, brooding piece to accompany "Disintegration" and "Bloodflowers" for a trilogy of sorts. Smith refused and insisted that perky pop tunes are an integral part of Cure music, for better or for worse.

The first two songs on the album are gloomy, vintage Cure. In Labyrinth, Smith returns to his old existential ways: "Say it’s the same sun spinning in the same sky/Say it’s the same stars streaming in the same night/Tell me it’s the same world whirling through the same space/Tell me it’s the same time tripping through the same day…" Later in the song, he laments, "It’s not the same you."

Before Three lightens things up. The End of The World goes pop all over the place, a sweetener to the bitterness of Lost and Labyrinth. Dig that familiar bassline trotting under an ecstatic voice. It’s hard to believe that the guy who complains that the "sky is wrong" in track two is the same guy that animatedly states "I couldn’t love you more" in track four. It’s like listening to Hanging Garden one moment and then hearing Friday, I’m in Love the next. Although he backtracks a little by singing, "Maybe we didn’t understand… It’s just the end of the world."

Anniversary is nostalgic and atmospheric. Us or Them is one of the heaviest Cure songs to date. Here, the lyrics share headspace with Camus’ prose:

There is no terror in my heart

Death is with us all

We suck him down with our first breath

And spit him out as we fall…

Whew! Smith sounds like a professor sometimes. Although when I attended college, teachers with deathly pallor and corpse-like torsos taught physical education. How ironic.

alt.end has those inventive guitars going for it, while (I Don’t Know What’s Going) On will compel yuppies who dig flashy cars and "New Wave" to shake their khakis. Taking Off is another pop rhinestone. The Promise builds up slowly like The Same Deep Water As You and then reaches a stirring climax where the singer is left "still waiting." Waiting for Godot, perhaps?

(In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, Godot never shows up and the wait propels the whole absurd theater production. Godot could mean God, authenticity, epiphany, Elmer Fudd, anything. Maybe Smith was thinking along these lines. He’s one of those rockers who made good use of a library card.)

A caveat: One track titled The Boy I Never Knew didn’t make the final cut. It is said to be one of the saddest Cure songs ever penned. That’s too bad.

For all it’s worth, this is an excellent platter for Cure fans (whatever their preference), and for those who dig albums "recorded live in candlelit rooms and mixed very loud in the dark." And as always, Robert Smith sees the world as both a gorgeous and a gloomy place to live in. He thinks "hell is living with other people" and that a person can be "just like heaven." And he still believes that life is a weird procession of joy and despair. I think this is a healthy attitude. Schizophrenia, I guess, is not a malady but the human condition. (Fittingly enough, for the album cover, Smith asked his nephews and nieces to illustrate their best dreams and worst nightmares.)

"I can’t find myself," Smith murmurs at the start of the album. The same goes for all of us squirming in our happy doom.

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Special thanks to Yasmin Ortiga for the definitive Cure magazine. For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.