Pornography (original) (raw)

Between 1980 and 1982, the Cure switched lineups, switched producers, made friends with the pop charts, and steadily toured Europe. They also got drunk, got weird, got in fistfights with one another, took loads of drugs, walked off tour, and generally danced through some surreal Kabuki version of the Libertines' recent press. We're looking for a word and the word is "tumult."

Which makes it kind of striking that they also, during those same years, released three remarkable records that represent the first phase of their many-phased career. These albums are the latest in Rhino's series of two-disc deluxe-package reissues: Stylish smoke-and-mirrors new-wave on Seventeen Seconds, dark pop drama on Faith, and all-out emotional assault on Pornography.

What's so remarkable about them? Start with Seventeen Seconds, which is a perfect example of the kind of record that's been subdivided out of existence-- a lying-in-bed-dreaming record, a guitar record that make no distinction between pop pulse, rock catharsis, and the atmospheric space we now mostly get from computers. With this album, it's all three at once-- all the austere, spooky grace of Robert Smith's Asian-art fixations gathering up to inhabit a clean, minimalist new-wave package. Album-accounting types might get antsy over how many of these tracks are about building mood, slinking along as the exact opposite of today's amaze-me-now aesthetics. But even the shiftiest of iPod types, buried beneath the covers some morning, will remember that an album like this doesn't work any other way. The sound is like a bare room with four guys in black occupying just enough space to let you wander on your own, and when they stop slinking around and let the pop move-- see "Play for Today"-- they do it with incredible elegance, winking and posing from behind the smoke machine.

And then there's Faith, which sounds best of the three in about 60% of normal human moods. It's best in those bean-counting album-consistency more-for-your-money terms, sure, but that's hardly the big draw; the thrill here is hearing the Cure shape up into the singular band that trailed on through the next couple of decades. This is a band, after all, that did something indie guitar bands haven't lately been so great at-- tapping into vivid emotional drama in a form that felt entirely unpremeditated, creating a fantasy world coherent and accessible enough that your average 13-year-old didn't need to be up on any scenes to get sucked into it. A band whose career highlights were all about shading one intense emotion into another-- blurring the line between severe depression and total joy, making bright colors and Christmas seem like the mopiest things ever, and eventually, with Disintegration, making an album that was both oceanically bleak and entirely sparkly-beautiful, to the point where you imagine ghost-couples ballroom dancing to it.