Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Best of Bob, 2 Jan 2007
OK, I confess: despite my admiration for Robert Smith's undoubted talent, I've not been any more than a fair weather fan of the Cure and have only bought a handful of albums over the years. However, `Seventeen Seconds' is one of my all time favourites so perhaps I'll be forgiven. Nevertheless, I did buy `Head on the Door' on glorious vinyl in 1985 and quite liked it but like so many other vinyl albums, it fell into non-use when CD came along and I have not played it for at least 10 years. So when this newly remastered version hit my CD player, I was astounded to be reminded what a good album it is.
Kicking off with the bubbling `In Between Days', the album bursts into life and unlike some other Cure albums, this energy hardly drops through most of the first half until you reach the truly great stuff starting with the semi-instrumental `Push'. What follows is perhaps one of the best consecutive runs in Bob's cannon and comprises `A Baby Screams', `Close to You' and the monumental `A Night Like This', the latter now being my favourite Cure track ever. Never has Smith created such a melt-in-the-mouth melody and backed it up with a massively passionate vocal. The swaying, insistent beat just adds the icing to the cake and despite the cheesy drum fills and dreaded sax solo, nothing can diminish the sheer bittersweet joy this song elicits - how on earth did I forget about it?
All this and the beautiful closer, `Sinking' - what more do you need from a Cure album? Go buy!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great album given extra depth, 17 Dec 2006
For me, this is one of the Cure's best albums. Alongside the cacophany of Pornography and melancholy of Disintegration, I think that this is the one that best highlights the various shades of light and dark that there are in the Smith cannon. Inbetween Days is the one where Robert mastered the classy pop song (he'd perfect it with Just Like Heaven 2 years later), though the fact it's followed by the beautifully instumented Kyoto Song tells you that while he might have learned a few things since Let's Go To Bed's crassy commercialism, he didn't forget how to write something as dreamily hypnotic as Just One Kiss. It's this broad pallett that encapsulates the spirit of the whole album, taking in Spanish guitars (The Blood), twisted funk grooves (Screw), complete desolation (Sinking), adrenaline-rushing positivity (Push) and perhaps the greatest example of Robert Smith's unique somehow-melancholy-yet-somehow-uplifting-at-the-same-time brand of pop (A Night Like This). Although there are many Cure albums more rewarding than this, this is the microcosm of all that made them so special in the 80s.
And to the extra disc... the Inbetween Days demo is divine, just Robert in his flat when the riff came to him and a fascinating insight into the birth of a great popsong. Inwood and Innsbruck are demos that hark to the fact that there were a lot of dark things still going on under the surface, despite the upbeat feeling to most of the album and the relative single b-sides. Indeed, for those who do not own Join The Dots (the b-side retrospective released a few years back) there are also tentative demos of lost classics like Stop Dead, A Few Hours After This, The Exploding Boy and A man Inside My Mouth. There is also a glimpse into the experimentation of the band's sound and how much further it could have been stretched with Lime Green (and the chance to hear Robert do the best Bowie impression ever with the intro!). The live tracks are a nice touch to finish off, especially the live version of Sinking. It's the sound of a band on a threshold, on top form and about to take on the world, and just maybe win...
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