cured, part 2
splintered in my head
There's two kinds of "extremely anxious." There's the kind of anxious where you can feel the bomb in your head counting down, click-click-click, every part of every field of sensory input magnified, every world event feeling like a portent of coming apocalypse. And then there's the kind of anxious where all you can think about is the fact that you, your mom, your friends, your lovers, are all going to die and be cast into eternal oblivion and everything you have ever done or will ever do, inevitably, will mean nothing to anybody and then, of course, the universe itself will die, and all you can do is shiver on the couch with visions of hell dancing behind your eyes. It is during this initial period of The Cure's career, spanning from Three Imaginary Boys to Pornography, that we can see the band evolving from the first type of anxiety to the second.
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I might as well get this out of the way now so I don't have to waste time establishing this opinion later. For what it's worth, The Cure are, in my opinion, the best B-sides band of all time, which is saying a lot since the milieu of 70s and 80s British post-punk bands that they were part of is basically their entire competition on this front.
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Seventeen Seconds, despite being perhaps the most perennially underrated of the trilogy, is also perhaps the most impressive in terms of artistic growth, representing the largest and most cohesive leap in style and substance.
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When you're listening to The Cure's entire discography straight through, it's sometimes tempting to think of Faith as a frustrating stopgap before you're allowed to enjoy the masterpiece that is Pornography, but that's a fallacy. Faith is a fantastic record on its own terms.
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Taken together, Seventeen Seconds and Faith are something like a hauntology of The Cure. These gauzy, spectral bodies cast a shadow: textually dense despite not seeming to have corporeal weight; holding court over the rest of The Cure's career no matter what other directions they seem to go in as a band. These whispy, doom-laden goth masterpieces are part and parcel with who The Cure is as a band, and are at least partially why I connect The Cure so closely with existentialism and death in my mind despite so much of the real estate reserved for The Cure in my head being devoted to their time as pop craftsmen par excellence.
Of course, Seventeen Seconds and Faith are only telling two-thirds of that story. The album that cements The Cure's position as goth royalty and as merchants of despair, discontent, and disorder is the oppressive masterwork that is Pornography.
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The Cure never made an album like Pornography ever again.
NEXT TIME: The Cure releases a series of pop songs and an album of messy psychedelic pop sludge that allows Robert Smith to radically reinvent his own songwriting wheel. They then proceed to record two of the finest alt rock records of the 80s and officially become the best B-sides band of all time. Inadvertently, this contributes to a fracturing of the underground DIY punk, hardcore, and metal scenes. We'll break it down by October 24th. Between now and then, I'll see y'all soon with a Halloween-themed essay or two. Have a good spooky season.
-xoxo, Ellie
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