![]() ![]() It’s muscular (like on the title track), wistful (“Pictures of You”), ghostly (“Closedown”), seething (“Fascination Street”), and yeah, morose, but what’s striking is how each of those qualities can reach really, really far into your gut. The trick, I think, is how well it serves as a soundtrack to that feeling that everything around you is meaningful, whether it’s beautiful or horrible or sublime: This is an album for capital-R Romantics, not sulkers. #Cure disintegration full#A whole lot of this album’s appeal is that it’s comforting, practically womblike-big, warm, slow, full of beauty and melody and even joy. If you want to be crushingly depressed with Disintegration, or frustrated, or self-loathing, it’ll embrace you right back. This is the thing: The album has a reputation as some huge, dark, crushingly depressive experience. “I will always love you,” it keeps promising-not the way you sing that in a giddy love song, but like it’s a grave, solemn, bloody commitment. It’s not an emo whine, and it’s not a big miserablist mope, either one of its most popular tracks, “Lovesong,” was written by Smith as a wedding present for his wife. And yet Disintegration is not a very teenagey album. ![]() It’s no wonder this was meaningful to a lot of teenagers: The sheer emotional grandeur of tracks like that opener, “Plainsong,” make a great match for the feeling that everything in your life is all-consumingly important, whether it’s your all-consuming sadness, joy, longing, or whatever. You can sense that focus straight from the first minute, during which some wind chimes knock around in an empty void, and then the band bursts out with one of the most overwhelmingly grand openings I’ve ever heard on a pop record-a slow-motion, radiant synth figure of such scale that Sofia Coppola has plausibly used it to soundtrack the coronation of Louis XVI. If Kiss Me is a crowded, teeming city to explore, listening to Disintegration is more like standing in the middle of some vast, empty space-the kind of ocean or plain where you can see the horizon in all directions. They’d always been good at this kind of album, too. Disintegration does not “scatter.” It’s a single, grand, dense, continual, epic trip into core stuff the Cure did well. The same went for Standing on a Beach / Staring at the Sea, a collection of singles stretching from 1978 to 1985, that was critical to introducing this band to North Americans.īut mostly there was Disintegration: the record where Robert Smith approached turning 30, got engaged and then married, got annoyed with the way his band was working, and went off by himself to write something deep and serious. This is something the band always did well: listening to their “many moods” pop records is like exploring a new city, where every storefront and side street offers something unique. There was Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, a 1987 double album that scatters in a lot of different directions. You could say-again, from an American perspective-that it started with two things. ![]()
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