Disintegration (20th Anniversary Edition)

by

The Cure

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Disintegration is the best album ever....

God bless the boys from South Park. Kyle may have gotten it right. This album is epic. Before this record The Cure's music was underground club type music, and fit very nicely in the "post-punk" label. The music on this record has an incredibly beautiful melancholy to it. Most of the songs have a slow tempo and just ooze with a dark moodiness that makes you feel. I don't know that it can make everyone feel the same, but it will definitely make you feel.

The songs are a bit long, but that is not a bad thing as each is beautifully orchestrated. There is no filler in this record, and actually some of The Cure's best work is on this album. "Pictures Of You", "Love Song", "Lullaby", "Fascination Street", and "Prayers For Rain" are probably the best songs, but every song is incredible. Overall it's as bleak as any album I've ever heard, and it is painfully intimate. It's one I simply can't stop listening to, despite the dark melancholy of the music.

This is The Cure album for people that aren't even Cure fans. You don't have to be into moody, gothic, synthpop to appreciate just how great this record is. The album is nearly 12 years old, and doesn't sound dated at all. The material is still fresh, timeless. Enjoying this record is simply a beautiful experience.

By 1989, I had turned my back on The Cure. They were yesterday's news. At the time if you had asked me "who is The Cure?" I would say the Cure was a post-punk British rock band that should best be remembered for three great studio albums recorded as 3 member band in the early 1980s (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography) and an interesting live record in 1984 (Concert) recorded with a 5 member band. Other than that, most of what the Cure had been making in the mid-1980s was "Bubble Gum Goth" - silly teenage new wave pop music in another package. It was frivolous music. But it made a lot of money for Robert Smith, Simon Gallup et al. It was a product that could really be sold to American teenagers in a way that "Pornography" just couldn't. After Kiss Me x3, I dismissed the Cure.

Then along came Disintegration. Granted, Disintegration doesn't represent a major break from the mid-1980s The Cure. It is a record recorded with the 5 member line up that had become standard for the Cure's mid-1980s work. It was a record rich in keyboards and synthesizers, unlike the original trilogy of great The Cure records I mention above, which had been mostly guitar, bass and drums (with a little bit of keyboard as an afterthought). So what makes Disintegration stand out as a good record, distinct from The Head on the Door, The Top, Japanese Whispers or Kiss Me x3? In my opinion, it is because they came full circle. They went back to the sound that they had on records like Faith and Pornography, and found a way to synthesize that early, dark sound with the full resources of the 5 member band.

It isn't a perfect album, mind you. Looking back 20 years later, I never listen to "Fascination Street" or "Love Song". Those are more of the mid-1980s The Cure that I would just as soon forget. But songs like "Prayers for Rain" and "Same Deep Water as You" are powerfully good tracks, even today.

This isn't the greatest The Cure record (I still give that to Pornography. What can I say? I am old school). But it is definitely in my short list of the top 3 records by the Cure. And it marked a new trajectory for them as artists - less frivolous, more serious, but with the big, full, lush sound they developed in the mid-1980s. The proof, however, is in the concerts. I saw the Cure several times in the mid-1980s. I remember on the Kiss Me 3x tour, almost all of the material they played was from the mid-1980s, except for an obligatory performance of Forest. But by the time they recorded Paris (but not "Show"!), they apparently had found a way to integrate songs from their 3 great records into their play list again. This was a much needed re-adjustment of a band that had drifted way too far from the sound that made them great to begin with.