A love song called “Lovesong”? Up to that point, Smith had shrouded his sentiments in literary references and lush metaphors. Initially, the song seemed to me to be too simple and direct for The Cure. single in the form of “Lovesong,” an elegiac hymn to undying romance that captured the heart and imagination of the radio-listening and record-buying public at large. Disintegration soon became The Cure’s mainstream breakthrough, spawning a hit U.S. I came around, as did many other listeners. And here was Smith, living up to the stereotype. I had just spent an entire year of my life defending The Cure to anyone who would listen, trying to argue that they weren’t the cartoonish goth band everyone at my high school thought they were. Budding music critic that I was, I felt dumbfounded by The Cure’s regression into molasses-paced glumness. For some, Disintegration felt like a backslide at best, a self-parody at worst I was one of those people at first. Pepper’s, decided to release Meet the Beatles. It was as if John, Paul, George, and Ringo, immediately after the kaleidoscope of Sgt. Things could hardly be worse.” Many critics and fans were bummed by what they saw as the monochromatic sameness of Disintegration. “A protracted wallow in the misery of love unrequited or recalled in hopeless desolation” is what Britain’s Q magazine called Disintegration upon its release, adding, “Eleven years and eight studio albums into The Cure’s career and still playing the confused adolescent adrift in suburban heartbreak. Then, like the ultimate contraction of our own universe, their Big Bang led to an entropic collapse, which they fittingly titled Disintegration. Then they threw everything against the wall with Kiss Me. They delivered a trio of devastatingly stark albums in the early ’80s- Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography-that trawled the sludge of the frontman Robert Smith’s soul. They debuted in 1979 with short, spiky, post-punk songs about boys crying and Albert Camus. Instead, the record wove a single mood-depressive solitude-and majestically adorned itself in it.ĭespite their reputation as the figureheads of gloomy goth, The Cure had always been tonally playful. I bought it in May 1989, took it home, and expected the cassette to unspool with splashes of neon color and vivid emotion, as had Kiss Me. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me echoed all the wild mood swings (to borrow the name of a Cure album that wouldn’t be released until 1996) of my emerging bipolar disorder. The smorgasbord of an album was The Cure’s equivalent of The Clash’s notoriously indulgent Sandinista!, and I adored it. The group’s record immediately prior, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, was a double-length affair that trafficked in psychedelia and disco. After it, I began to find myself.ĭisintegration, the British band’s eighth album, came out soon after I turned 17-or 30 years ago this week. Before it, I was a moody wallflower who had no idea who he was. The music of The Cure, equal parts menacing and cleansing, split my life in half. On top of that, I was grappling with the onset of what I wouldn’t realize until decades later was bipolar II disorder. We were poor, which added an extra dimension of alienation as I tried to adjust to a new school. I was 16 and had recently moved from Florida to Denver with my family. When I first encountered The Cure, I was lost.
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