cured, part 3

the glove, the top, and the banshees

Robert Smith's departure from the morose antagonism of Pornography was hardly a surprise--not only was the record representative of one of the lowest emotional points of his life, it also marked a zenith in their songwriting within that sonic model. Even if the critics at the time did not appreciate what was going on with Pornography's intensely self-aware self-loathing and overbearing walls of heavy proto-shoegaze guitar noise and suffocating eerie melodies (accurately described by more than one reviewer as "Phil Spector in hell"), it was their most successful record released to that point. Clearly the youth, particularly in the UK, found something resonant in poignant in Smith so nakedly and provocatively pouring his distress out on record.

But Smith, always something of a contrarian, pulled back from the crowd he was seeing at shows, and feeling cleansed after the baptism-by-fire of the Pornography recording sessions and a month-long detox period, started writing a series of synth-driven, openly new wave-indebted pop material that deliberately put the guitar on the back foot and emphasized his knack for hooks and outward romanticism. The latter wasn't necessarily a new weapon in The Cure's arsenal--after all, "Boys Don't Cry" had already been released a few years prior. But this was the first time that the guitar elements had been so desaturated, as well as the first time that Smith was the dominant voice not only in terms of songwriting but also in performance.

Lol Tolhurst, never the most rock-solid musician in the best of times, had been demoted to the vague credit of "keyboards" on first new single "Let's Go to Bed" (and would continue to be credited for less and less things in the studio as time went on, famously culminating with "other instruments"--in other words, literally nothing--in the liner notes of Disintegration). Gallup had also departed shortly after the hellish recording of Pornography, leaving Smith to handle almost everything. The Cure's next three singles--released over the course of about a year from November 1982 to October 1983 and mostly collected on the Japanese Whispers compilation--display a Robert Smith learning how to become more confident exploring more and more of his instincts as a songwriter and frontman, as his vocals would become more daring and expressive and he would start to become more ambitious with his arrangements, influences, and song construction.

Despite being catchier and, at least on a surface level, more upbeat than their goth material, the reason much of the material from the Japanese Whispers era succeeded commercially as much as it did is that you can still sense the jagged teeth gnashing beneath the sparkling waves of synth. Smith noted during this time that people with "perfect pretty teeth" began turning up to shows; my guess is that the veneer of pop accessibility allowed those people to dip a toe in their darker music preferences without full-on embracing a goth aesthetic, which is a perfectly fine and valid thing.

All that being said, while I think there are some real gems here, I often find myself going back to this material much less than the rest of The Cure's mid-80s output. Of the A-sides, my chief favorite is actually one of Smith's least favorite songs, having referred to it in the past as a complete joke: "The Lovecats." There's something about its snazzy, jazzy piano bars and Smith's "ba-da-da"s that really accentuate the more whimsical aspects of the track. I think its more carefree attributes are actually what Smith is reticent to fully embrace about this song, but I think that it works to the song's benefit as an out-and-out pop track and helps to make the darker aspects of the other songs stronger when viewed as part of a whole. "The Lovecats" single was also home to one of my favorite B-sides, "Mr. Pink Eyes," which combines the jazzy upbeat piano strokes with a subtly dark, driving guitar melody buried in the mix that keeps the song on a slightly chaotic razor's edge before it falls apart completely at the end. It's absolutely baffling that this was the only B-side of the era to not be included in the Japanese Whispers collection, but it is luckily on Join the Dots.

While "Let's Go to Bed" and "The Walk" are both perfectly fine synthy new wave tracks with a bit of dark drama to them, I'm just not quite as partial to them as I am "The Lovecats," though of the two I prefer "Let's Go to Bed," which has a hypnagogic-jerk quality to its rhythmic cadence that really lends it a sort of dynamic nervousness. The B-sides are mostly also fine--above average for any other band, but pretty average by the standards of The Cure. The one that sticks out to me, for its lovable quirkiness, is probably "The Dream," which instrumentally kind of sounds like an outtake from the EarthBound soundtrack (coming from me, that's a high, high compliment for a synth-driven song, trust me).

Elsewhere, it just seems like Smith is trying to flex new songwriting muscles and though the results were probably impressive at the time, he'd eclipse these heights so rapidly and so completely that they unfortunately underwhelm with the benefit of hindsight, though I suppose it's unfair to consider that the fault of the songs themselves. It is clear that the weakest song in this collection, "La Ment," is also the one that sounds most like a song in The Cure's more traditional goth mode. The other songs all at least attempt something interesting and unique with the synth (and occasionally drum machine) setups, and all of them at least clear the bar of "listenable," often with enough of a sense of darkly romantic drama humming in the background to keep things from getting too cheery and detached from The Cure's un-beating heart.

In addition to synthpop, Smith was also delving deeper into psychedelia as an influence on his songwriting, influenced at least in part by his deepening partnership with Siouxsie & the Banshees, who had emerged as The Cure's sister band and most ambitious artistic peers and collaborators as the 70s UK post-punk underground had completely been absorbed by the pop world. While Siouxsie and drummer Budgie were exploring other sonic avenues with The Creatures and their spectacular guitarist John McGeoch had been fired due to a combination of alcoholism and a nervous breakdown (ironic, considering Smith's condition at this time), Banshees bassist Steven Severin and Smith formed a band called The Glove, named after the flying glove from The Beatles film Yellow Submarine.

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-xoxo, Ellie