cured, part 4

cut, breathe, and fight

Where are you supposed to go after writing one of the best pop records of the 80s and you're operating at what is perhaps your peak quantity and quality of songwriting? If you're The Cure, you decide to do the obvious thing and write your most ambitious record yet--a stylistically-varied double-album running at the then-gargantuan length of nearly 80 minutes--and, even though it's incredibly self-indulgent and everybody knows it, it works. Does it reach the highs of The Head On the Door or Disintegration on either side of it? Not quite, unfortunately, but it connects far more often than it misses.

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is that thorn in the side of music critics everywhere: a double album that actually earns its length. Much like other albums that have managed to accomplish this feat (Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, Zen Arcade, Double Nickels On the Dime, The Fragile, Wu-Tang Forever), there is both a clarity of purpose and a sprawling, voracious attitude towards songwriting here. Robert Smith has gone on record as saying The Cure almost made this record a triple album, and the B-sides are good enough that you can almost envision them making good on their threat.

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me's breadth is remarkable at least in part because of, at this point, how naturally The Cure have managed to explore all these different genres. They even manage to work through several different sounds in one song; the opener "The Kiss" marries a dark, throbbing goth energy to alt pop hookiness so effectively that the transition to sugar-sweet, completely unaffected pop on "Catch" goes down extremely smoothly.  The band splits the difference again on "Torture," a song whose stark romanticism and self-consciously melodramatic lyrics are swaddled in a gorgeous guitar blanket. That disarmingly comforting guitar blanket morphs into an atmosphere of quiet confusion and unease throughout the Middle Eastern-inflected drone of "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep."

Kiss Me is really the moment that The Cure embraced the possibilities granted to them by the studio, and created multi-layered guitar symphonies that bolstered both the more sophisticated arrangements Smith and company were experimenting with and the subtly complex pop melodies that every song was doused in. Though they would eventually take this approach even further on Wish, it's here that you can see this approach start to pay dividends, particularly with "Just Like Heaven," one of the band's most enduring and architecturally impressive songs. There's the extended intro where Thompson, Tolhurst, and Smith keep stacking layers of guitar and keyboard melodies on top of each other, and you think it can't get any more sugar-sweet until Smith breaks in with the ineffably perfect verses. ("Just Like Heaven" is one of those weird songs where the chorus is actually less catchy than the verses.) It is an absolutely perfect pop song, one that weightlessly whirls its way through cotton candy clouds without ever sounding saccharine or disposable.

More driving and desperate than the painstakingly composed and stately "Just Like Heaven" is the lead single from Kiss Me, the lightly jazz-inflected gem "Why Can't I Be You?", a song that fuses stuttering guitars with heavily processed 80s horns and some really fascinating obsessive and psychosexual lyrics for a song that's as fun and dancey and romantic as it is unnerving and maybe even slightly threatening. The pivot back to densely layered and gently accented--there are swells of orchestral strings and hints of tinkly piano all over the place, but they never overwhelm the song--pop beauty on "How Beautiful You Are" is almost jarring, but it feels perfectly appropriate when you're a third of the way into the record and have gotten used to its odd rhythm.

Maybe it's from listening to the record too much, but the older I get, the fewer missteps I find in Kiss Me. I used to get bored during the 7-minute proto-shoegaze swirl of "The Snakepit," but the gently hypnotic rhythm beneath the seething mass of gauzy guitar melodies has now become mesmerizing and soothing rather than stultifying. Conversely, "Hey You!!!"--a mostly-instrumental two-minute song once considered weak enough to be left off the original CD issue of the record--I now find extremely endearing and adorable, full of snazzy horn licks and an undeniable sugar rush of energy, a perfect palate cleanser between the moody intensity of "The Snakepit" and the exuberant elegance of "Just Like Heaven."

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-xoxo, Ellie