"Say it's the same you"
Written: Jul 02 '04 (Updated Feb 04 '05)
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| blksqul's Full Review: The Cure by The Cure |
Much has been made of Ross Robinson -- mostly known for his production work with Korn and Slipknot -- helming the Cure's first effort in four years. Among certain contingents of fans, much hand-wringing and navel-gazing was evident. "What if they change?" "What if they're all heavy and stupid?" "What if Robert Smith screams the whole time?"
Yes, there are people out there who believe that Robert and his band hit their peak with 1989's Disintegration, and they want the Cure to stick to that blueprint thank you. To forever drape their songs in so many sleepy chords and so much spare, ringing guitar that you can smell the fog of an endless night as the music plays. Well, guess what, kiddies? Robert Smith is 45 years old, he sits on the board of directors for XFM radio, and he is one of the ten richest entertainers in all of the UK. You have to realize that going back to past glories would be a cheat and a lie. He is not the same person -- the band is not the same band. Everybody has matured. Deal with it.
This album is a break from the past in many ways. For one, the artwork comprises children's drawings done by Robert's nieces and nephews on the front and back cover and throughout the booklet, giving the album a much more innocent, if still darkly tinged, look than the doomed visuals of the past. For another, the keyboard -- the Cure's sure way of layering on atmospherics -- is only mixed at the volume of the rest of the band on certain tracks. Another difference, the Cure has never self-titled an album before. Finally, Robert Smith has said that this is not the band's last album. This is huge.
Smith has been crying wolf over breaking up the band since the beginning, but it was only on 2000's Bloodflowers that it actually seemed like he was going to go through with it. The songs were mostly wistful, poignant reflections on growing too old, getting too numb and wishing yourself away. There were a few moments of sonic meltdown -- take the 11-minute behemoth Watching Me Fall -- but on the whole, the album was softly played and lost in its own melancholy realizations of entropy. It didn't fight. It surrendered.
So to open this album with Lost -- at once the most amelodic, dissonant, charged thing in the Cure's canon, ready to fall apart with each note, Smith singing "I can't find myself" until he ends up screaming it by the end of the song, it echoed back, at the past, at windows and mirrors, at "strangers in love" -- you realize this band still has a wonderous future ahead of them, if they can still make music as powerful as this. Lost is the most raw and vital the Cure have sounded in a long time, perhaps ever. They have taken the intensity of their live shows, and captured it on a studio disc.
You can thank Ross Robinson for this. He forced Smith to share the meaning of each song to the rest of the band each day before recording. Smith, who keeps those meanings as closely guarded secrets, was shocked. He had never had to do this before, and the resulting arguments were fierce. So fierce, in fact, that Roger O'Donnell, the keyboardist, threatened to quit. But what this process did was bond the band in ways they never before had bonded, and it shows in the playing.
Robinson also forced the band to record this album as live takes, with Smith singing as the band was playing -- something they hadn't been doing since the mid-'80s. You can feel the intensity, the grandeur, the awe of hearing this band come back from the grave to spit in the face of anyone who doubted their importance, their vitality, their perfection. We're the Cure, g_ddamnit, this album shouts. Respect.
Following Lost is Labyrinth, a track which takes the implicit Eastern influence of songs like Wailing Wall and If Only Tonight We Could Sleep and weds it to a new technical purity. The song sweeps and seeps and flows, all bottomed-out glory and psychedelia. Over this, Smith sings of a nostalgic past with a vocal treated to sound like it's underwater. He begs an unnamed party to tell him it's the same house, the same room, the same boy -- that nothing has changed. "Say it's the same you," he pleads.
Then reality comes in; the watery effect goes away and Smith's vocals come on full-bore. He realizes everything is different, everything is wrecked. "The house is dark -- the room is scarred!/The boy is stiff -- the bed is hard! ... The taste is dry -- the kiss is thirst!" He wails "It's not the same you! It's not the same you! And it never really is!" as the band backs him up with punishing, urgent playing. The track ends with a heartbroken, treated vocal again. Everything has to have changed, he sings "... or it's me." He hesitates, then lets out an audible sigh as the track echoes out.
Before Three comes on with a repeated, melodic riff that threatens to swallow out the rest of the band. It settles down a bit, gains a little more space, as Smith sings of "the happiest day I ever knew." He details a time spent under the stars on the beach with his love, looking up at the winter moon while "so f_cked and high." That's the key to unlocking the darkness of this song. He sings with a certain desperation, knowing that the happiest days are long gone. That on their happiest day together they were too effed up to communicate also speaks volumes on the nature of this relationship.
The End of the World sounds much more like the Cure as a band on this version than it does on the single. It has a context, gets rid of some of the swirly overdubs of the radio version, and speaks out on the theme of this album -- of a relationship breathing its last. It's still the poppiest thing on this record, but the bass is brought out more, the keyboard is consigned to strange laser sound effects, and Smith's voice sounds deceptively bright.
My favorite track, Anniversary, is next. It takes the Cure into a whole new place. It has some of the atmosphere of past works, but not in a speaker-engulfing Disintegration way. It's much more subtle in its evocation, with a distant electronic drumbeat and full-bodied minor chords breaking the calm.
The song marks the one moment of hope on this disc. In the first verse, Smith sings regretfully of letting his love go. But in the bridge, he lets himself go from a minor key to a major -- letting in the light. It's a technique that Smith has never used before, and it is striking in its formality and promise. The second verse speaks in the present tense -- "Another moment -- there always is" -- and ends with "I never let you go" repeated, repeated, repeated.
Us or Them is a monster. Smith wails and cracks with his guitar, the band thuds and thumps, everything breaks as Smith screams against the War on Terror. It should be obvious by "There is no terror in my heart," the first words, and later on "The doleful cant of a bigot" that Smith is none too pleased with Bush, Blair and their ilk. "Get your f_cking world out of my head!" he screams at one point, and "Get my f_cking head out of your world!" at another. He positively erupts during the chorus, a mix of rage and sadness and loathing -- "I don't need your Us or Them. No I don't need your Us or Them. Oh, I don't want your Us or Them. I don't need your Us or Them." A simple message, but an important one, hammered in by the wrecked tune backing it.
alt.end could very well be a single. The riff makes fleet half-steps up the fretboard, a hollow synthesized clap can be heard every once and again, and Smith explores new lyrical territory (yes, 25 years into the band's career). For the first time, Smith isn't mooning over a girl, or begging for her back because of his mistakes. He's fed up. He doesn't care anymore.
"And I don't want another go around/I don't want to start again/No I don't want another go around/I want this to be the end" goes the chorus. The verses are just as dismissive -- "Yeah it's a big bright beautiful world out there/Just the other side of the door/Six billion beautiful faces/But I saw it all before." A kiss-off worthy of the Violent Femmes.
(I Don't Know What's Going) On is a confused song. The sound is both thick and muffled, which goes well with Smith's words of being so in love with someone that you can't make heads or tails of the situation. In fact, the song is much more about obsession than it is about love, and that is hinted at in one small drop -- "I am so disturbed by you" -- and by the faux-sun of the chorus, Smith getting higher and higher into his falsetto as he lets out "No don't say anymore/To me at all/To me at all/To me at aa-aaa-aaa-aaa-aallll." That's happy?
Taking Off is a special song. The keyboards are instantly identifiable as the Cure by their sweet, enveloping melody. The guitar, echoed and high, sounds like something off of Wish. There is strumming in the background. Now, whenever the Cure have strummed in the past, we've ended up with songs like Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven and A Pink Dream. This is another dreamy swirl, Smith doing his best to sing about his approximation of love with nothing but joy in his voice. "But tonight/I climb with you/Tonight/So high with you/Tonight/I shine with you/Tonight/I'm so alive..."
You'll notice how Smith never mentions love in this song, and this would be a good time to explain something about Robert that has been true from the beginning. He is a born existentialist; therefore he treats every day as though it were the only day. This can lead to bouts of wall-melting passion and bursts of extreme overindulgence. But true, adult love is built on more than sensation and the here and now. It's built on seeing things both as day to day and with a perspective to the future. Robert has never been able to take the longview.
You'll notice that even in Lovesong, he never supplies the second part of the equation, of what he does for her. The entire song is about what she does for him. That is selfish and one-sided -- it's about need much more than it is about love. And that is why so many of Robert's songs are apologies, or about flings, or about the end of everything. That is why so many teen-agers score their romances to the Cure.
Never has drawn ire from certain quarters, but I'll tell those fans to stick their head in a bucket of ice water. It sounds nothing like the Cure aside from Smith's voice and lyrics. It's much more a stray Smashing Pumpkins track than it is a Cure track, with its low, compressed feel, its instruments all battering you at once in a slinky, possessive way. And I say to that, thank god Smith and the boys are able to come up with something so effortlessly new this far into their career! You should be celebrating, not moaning.
This is another side to Smith's lyrics. A relationship is dying, but in this song, he is saying how hard the girl is trying to keep it alive. "She is trying to be the one for me," he admits. But he's experienced enough to know this will never work out, that both of them are equally mismatched. Yes, Smith actually puts the onus on himself and the girl equally. When has he ever done that before?
The American version of the album closes with The Promise, a 10-minute track that is on par with epic closers like End, Sinking, and the Top. It's the reason for candles burning in dark rooms. Smith has not sounded this urgently, aggressively close to falling apart in a long time. Musically, the song takes a slow, trudging riff that eventually speeds up more and more until it is the twin of the shredded, spastic guitar on The Kiss.
For those who worry about Robert's and Mary's marriage, who keep seeing lyrical clues to relationship rot from album to album (I'm one of those people), this will not make you sleep any better at night. The song opens with Smith trying to do one of his high, cooing mews, but it is quickly strangled by rage. Smith sings "You promised me/time will heal/make me forget! ... You promised me/time will heal all/and love will save!" He becomes more and more anguished, more and more defeated -- "I trusted you! I wanted your words! Believed in you! I needed your words!" The song continues to build and build, until it explodes into shrapnel and bleeding wounds. "I buried the blame and I waited!/Choked back years of memories!/I pushed down the pain and I waited!" He wails in self-loathing, the music becoming more fierce and ugly, "You promised me another wish! Another way! You promised me another dream, another day!"
The music can't take much more. "You promised me ..... another lie!" Smith keeps wailing "You promised me" until it transforms into "And I waited .... and I waited .... and I waited ..." growing more and more fierce and sharp. As the song echoes back on itself, slowing down, falling apart into shambles, Smith, with more rage in his voice than I have ever heard -- more heartbreakingly real than even Pornography -- spits out "and I'm still waiting!" Everything ceases. The disc ends.
The Cure, my friends, are back.
Recommended:
Yes
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blksqul
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Member: Black Squirrel
Location: Nashua, NH
Reviews written: 99
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