Cure

Back in 1989, at the twilight of a musical decade full of both dazzling lights and dark shadows, and at the dawn of a new era steeped in anxiety and contradiction, a strange and captivating cover appeared on record store shelves. Through the multiple exposure of macabre, shadowy flowers (of evil, one might say, borrowing a little too freely — but perhaps aptly — from the bitter spleen of Baudelaire's poetry) set against a deep, dark green background, like murky, frozen waters, it let slip the sardonic smile and intense gaze of one of the most charismatic figures in pop and rock music. A gaze that had travelled through the entire decade just passed, widening its pupils in the shadowy post-punk of the early days of "Three Imaginary Boys", peering into the dark gothic abyss of "Seventeen Seconds", "Faith" and "Pornography", searching for shafts of light with "Japanese Whispers" and "The Top", and finally shaping itself into the grotesque mask — ironic and at times even playful — of the unsettling cross between a melancholy Pierrot and a sardonic Joker on the albums of the "pop turn": "The Head On The Door" and "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me".

By 1989, The Cure were no longer the obscure band for a (relatively) select few of the first three or four albums; they had become a famous band, one that filled stadiums, that in Italy had appeared as guests on popular TV shows, and that could count on a broad, cross-cutting audience ranging from rock devotees to fans of more generic pop, from gloomy young goths dressed in mourning black to the trendiest, most casual of listeners, won over by the irresistible melodies of hit singles like "In Between Days" or "Just Like Heaven".

For Robert Smith's band, the time had come to draw a line, to say the word "end", to close a chapter and lay the groundwork for a new beginning, fusing the darkness of their early days with the greater accessibility of the phase that followed. In other words: to rebuild, but only after destroying — indeed, disintegrating — the past. The title of the Cure's new work therefore made clear, all on its own, the aims and intentions of a work that would go down in rock history as perhaps the most controversial album in the band's discography: adored by millions of sensitive souls for the aching romanticism running through it, snubbed as too pompous and "commercial" by countless others, not a few of them longtime fans. I can only confess, without shame, to belonging to the first camp: "Disintegration" is a sumptuous, captivating work, melancholy and autumnal (though paradoxically released in the height of spring!), intensely desperate and desperately intense... it was love at first listen, the kind that lasts a lifetime.

Indeed, it isn't easy to talk about something you love so deeply: you risk being cloying, overwrought, or, quite simply, unable to find the words to convey such an all-consuming passion while still holding on to the shred of objectivity needed to write a remotely credible piece. I'll try starting from the beginning, from the first indispensable act of love towards a record: placing the vinyl on the turntable yet again, or more prosaically the CD in the player, turning up the volume (as the liner notes themselves recommend), and letting the shivers wash over me, today just as they did back then.

"Disintegration" is a classic "concept album", one of those works whose songs are inextricably bound to one another, forming a single unified piece that must be experienced in full in order to be understood and appreciated. The record is not simply a collection of pop songs; it is a cathartic journey, a purifying rite, a tormented descent through one's own personal circles of hell, in search of a light that, perhaps, will only appear at the very end of the journey. A perfect album to listen to on autumn afternoons, as the light slowly fades, wrapped in dark clouds, and rain begins to streak the windowpanes.

The album, produced by Robert Smith himself in collaboration with David M. Allen (who had already worked with such cult bands of the '80s as Sisters Of Mercy and Chameleons, as well as with Italy's own Gianna Nannini), was recorded at the Outside Studios in Berkshire and released by Fiction Records.

By now, the "three imaginary boys" of the early days had grown into a quintet: the band's line-up, in fact, closely resembled the one already tried out on "The Head On The Door" and "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me", with Robert Smith on guitar and vocals, the ever-faithful Simon Gallup on bass, Porl Thompson on guitar, Boris Williams on drums, and newcomer Roger O'Donnell, who was effectively brought in on keyboards to replace founding member Lol Tolhurst — credited in the album's liner notes, but already out of the Cure by the time the record was released.

"Disintegration" opens with "Plainsong", which from its very first notes reads like a statement of intent: grandiose, magniloquent, desperate, starting with its unforgettable instrumental intro — two minutes and forty seconds of almost orchestral-sounding psychedelia, smooth and rich in refined sonic effects, which gradually give way to Robert Smith's languid voice and lyrics steeped in gloomy, romantic gothic hues, telling of Eros, of Thanatos, and of the terrible, magnificent daze each of us feels before the person we love, before a smile that, like a flash of lightning, cuts through the darkness and knocks us off balance, making us feel as though we were teetering on the very edge of the world: "'I think it's dark and it looks like rain'/ You said/ 'And the wind is blowing like it's the end of the world'/ You said/ 'And it's so cold/ It's like the cold if you were dead'/ And then you smiled/ For a second/…/ Sometimes you make me feel/ Like I'm living at the edge of the world/ …/ 'It's just the way I smile'/ You said". "Plainsong" is only the beginning of the journey, and you can already sense it will be a painful one — but a necessary one.

The journey continues with “Pictures Of You”, one of the most beautiful songs (I'll go out on a limb and say it) in the history of pop music. Melancholic, poignant, nostalgic, seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds of pure ecstasy, a track miraculously balanced between almost easy-listening backing vocals, gothic atmospheres and psychedelic guitars: if “Plainsong” was the enunciation of pain, “Pictures Of You” is the melancholy of memory, the anguish of a love lost or never born, the nostalgia for a personal golden age that, perhaps, never actually existed: “Remembering you/ Standing quiet in the rain/ As I ran to your heart to be near/ And we kissed as the sky fell in/ Holding you close/ How I always held close in your fear/…/ If only I'd thought of the right words/ I could have held on to your heart/ If only I'd thought of the right words/ I wouldn't be breaking apart/ All my pictures of you”.

A carpet of percussion, over a wall of keyboards alternating with guitars soaked in lysergic flavour, introduces the album's third track, titled “Closedown”, which, though more rhythmic and apparently less brooding, features spare lyrics that once again speak of a desperate need for love: “I'm running out of time/ …/ If only I could fill/ My heart with love”.

“Lovesong”, an obstinate and perhaps quixotic assertion of one's own desire to love, is the classic “perfect” pop song, three minutes and thirty seconds that etch themselves indelibly into memory from the very first listen, warming the heart of any sensitive soul with lyrics that seem banal but, in their simplicity, precisely capture the all-consuming essence of love: “Whenever I'm alone with you/ You make me feel like I am home again/ Whenever I'm alone with you/ You make me feel like I am whole again/…/ However far away/ I will always love you”.

But Janus is always two-faced, and so, paradoxically, a song that has just declared a firm intention to love forever fades into the next one which, on the contrary, tells of a farewell: “Last Dance”, a song that seems understated but is in fact extremely evocative in its post-punk shadings that seem to come straight from the early '80s, is one of the two tracks originally left off the vinyl edition of the album and included only on the CD version (the other being “Homesick”). Through the metaphor of the last dance, the song tells of the poignant farewell to a love now lost and to a girl who has become a woman, moving away forever: “I'm so glad you came/ I'm so glad you remembered/ To see how we're ending/ Our last dance together/ …/ A woman now standing where once/ There was only a girl”.

We thus arrive at the famous “Lullaby”, the album's lead single but, probably, also the least interesting song in the collection. The track, extremely catchy and certainly evocative, is a somewhat contrived horror nursery rhyme, as well as a depiction of how we all become children again, frightened in the face of the darkness of night and the monsters that come in nightmares to disturb our sleep: “Quietly he laughs and shaking his head/ Creeps closer now/ Closer to the foot of the bed/ And softer than shadow and quicker than flies/ His arms are all around me and his tongue in my eyes/ “Be still, be calm, be quiet now, my precious boy/ Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more/ For it's much too late to get away or turn on the light/ The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight””. “Lullaby” is, in some ways, a foreign body within the arc of “Disintegration”, a playful “Danse Macabre” worthy of the “gentle” frights of Tim Burton's cinema, but one that seems to have very little in common with the epic, grandiloquent romanticism of the rest of the album.

The journey continues with the hammering percussion and unbowed guitars of the fierce, breakneck “Fascination Street” (one of the singles from the collection, alongside “Pictures Of You”, “Lovesong” and “Lullaby”), which originally closed side one of the vinyl edition.

With the second half of the album, the atmospheres grow even more leaden and evocative: “Prayers For Rain” is a taut, desperate prayer that seeks catharsis in the rain, the purifying cleansing that might redeem an existence reduced to the bare minimum by a love that, this time, is experienced as a total negation of the self: “You fracture me/ Your hands on me/ A touch so plain/ So stale it kills/ You strangle me/ Entangle me/ In hopelessness and/ Prayers for rain/ I deteriorate/ I live in dirt/ And nowhere glows/ But drearily and tired/ The hours all spent/ On killing time again/ All waiting for/ The rain”. The song is a net that relentlessly ensnares and enfolds you, six of the most unforgettable minutes on a collection astonishing for the extraordinary intensity it manages to produce.

And the rain finally arrives with “The Same Deep Water As You”: the song opens with the dark rumble of distant thunder and continues with the rustle of the long-awaited rain. It is perhaps the most poignant track on the whole record; Robert Smith seems to intone, almost in slow motion, a funeral chant with a solemn, grieving cadence that recounts, in the first person, a story of separation and loss (“Kiss me good-bye”), the difficulty of sharing a feeling (“Can't you see I try?/ Swimming the same deep water as you is hard”) and, once again, the stubborn assertion of one's own right and desire to love (“I will kiss you, I will kiss you/ I will kiss you forever on nights like this/ I will kiss you, I will kiss you/ And we shall be together”). “The Same Deep Water As You” is one of the album's supreme masterpieces, over nine minutes of dreamlike, unforgettable sonic flow in which it is both fascinating and frightening to lose oneself.

When the rain stops, it gives way to fury: the title track, “Disintegration”, with its epic, relentless drive, tells of the powerless rage that accompanies the literal disintegration of a relationship, the inner upheaval that the dissolution of a couple inevitably brings: “But I never said I would stay to the end/ So I leave you with babies and hoping for frequency/ Screaming like this in the hope of the secrecy/ Screaming me over and over and over/ I leave you with photographs/ Pictures of trickery/ Stains on the carpet and/ Stains on the scenery/ Songs about happiness murmured in dreams/ When we both us knew/ How the ending would be”. Robert Smith's vocal rises until it becomes a genuine cry of pain, as the “disintegration” is completed, literally tearing his heart to pieces: “Now that I know that I'm breaking to pieces/ I'll pull out my heart/ And I'll feed it to anyone”.

And yet, by that well-known law whereby every crisis carries within it an opportunity, even so traumatic an event as the dissolution of a love seems to hold a positive value: only by disintegrating one's own life, literally shattering it, can one attempt to gather up the fragments and rebuild them. Catharsis necessarily passes through destruction and reassembly, and, in the end, purification is achieved, through the poignant, tender melancholy of the beautiful “Homesick” (nostalgia… who hasn't felt it for someone or something?) and the composed calm (or at least quiet desperation) of “Untitled”, the final track on the record, the one where a defeat is finally acknowledged (“Never quite said what I wanted to say to you/ Never quite managed the words to explain to you/ Never quite knew how to make them believable/ And now the time has gone/ Another time undone”), but also the one of reconciliation and, perhaps, of a newly regained serenity. It is telling, in this sense, that “Untitled” is the only nearly luminous track on the album, a ray of pale sunlight breaking through the grey clouds to offer a new hope. Nor is it a coincidence that the song is “untitled”, becoming a kind of blank page open to the future, on which each of us might try to write a new story.

So ends the last great Cure album: the English band would carry on, with mixed results, up to the present day, and, in 2000, Robert Smith would explain how the new album “Bloodflowers” (perhaps their most convincing work of the last twenty years) was the third part of a sort of “dark trilogy”, begun in 1982 with “Pornography” and continued in 1989 with “Disintegration”. Reinforcing the common thread linking the three albums, a live DVD would be released in 2003, fittingly titled “Trilogy”, presenting the complete setlists of all three records in sequence.

Beyond its continuity with earlier or later work, “Disintegration” is a timeless, placeless creation, difficult to pigeonhole, which has won, from the very start but even more so as the years have passed, a devoted following of fans, won over by the epic, melancholic romanticism that flows (like autumn rain?) through the grooves of the twelve magnificent tracks that make it up.

The album of disintegration, of reassembly and purification, the album of rain, of poignant nostalgia and the melancholic smile, the album of love lost, of love found again, and of love that has no intention of ever ceasing, the album of life itself for many of us.

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27/11/2011