Product Description
Product Description
The cover says it all: three imaginary boys looking spectral and strange; lurid colour and an overall sense of nervous foreboding. This is the black pearl of the Cure's classic, 1981-3 period--not quite their most defiantly miserable album (that title still belongs, hands down, to Faith), but no picnic, either. The songs are slow, grave, and mysterious, evoking images of decay and desolation (from "Cold": "A shallow grave/ A monument to the ruined age... Everything as cold as life/ Can no-one save you?"), and set against these bleak vignettes, Smith's tremulous vocals have rarely sounded so forlorn. "Short Term Effect" describes a void: "No movement/ Just a falling bird/ Cold as it hits the bleeding ground", and it's a far cry from the playful eroticism of "Lovecats", or the sinister wish-fulfilment of "Close To Me". Still, it's possible to trace a direct line of descent, from this early triumph, to their glacial 1989 masterpiece, Disintegration. As ever, The Cure's greatest artistic highs are its most numbing lows. --Andrew McGuire
Description
For a band that's known worldwide as the premier purveyors of goth-rock gloom and doom (though hardly incapable of sparkling pop gems), it's no small thing to identify a particular album as their darkest, most disturbing sonic statement. Nevertheless, PORNOGRAPHY surely fills the bill. Reportedly created during a time of great psychological upheaval for group leader Robert Smith, it's a gloriously no-holds-barred existential angst-fest, from the very first line, "It doesn't matter if we all die". Not since Leonard Cohen's SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE had despair been so lovingly ladled into album form, but it's not just Smith's Prozac prescription that was upped during these sessions. His lyrical approach expanded as well, incorporating more stream-of-consciousness poetic imagery. And the rhythmic attack of bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Lol Tolhurst reached new heights of propulsiveness and viscerality as well, whether pounding out a churning syncopation on "The Hanging Garden" or delivering the heavy-hammered nail in the coffin on "A Short Term Effect".
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