More influential than all but a handful of bands in modern rock history, The Cure didn't often let the younger generation return the favor -- while on his own, Robert Smith would collaborate with acolytes like Crystal Castles or Blink , as a collective entity The Cure remained largely monolithic.
A fascinating exception was "Lost," opener to their self-titled album, which let producer Ross Robinson Deftones, Slipknot tap into a discordant rawness that had largely eluded the band in their third decade.
When discussing their most traditional modes, The Cure's more playful side often gets overlooked -- but Smith's rediscovery of his sense of whimsy was critical in breaking them out of the goth-rock holding pattern they threatened to get stuck in for much of the early '80s. Another brilliant title-track closer, best remembered for its steadily quaking bass line, like a bell ringing for an impending doomsday.
It's the ideal note of queasiness to finish one of the band's most muddled albums -- The Top is hardly the full-scale misstep it's often portrayed as, but it was certainly a transition set, ending the first half of The Cure's '80s with the band a little adrift between frolicking pop oddities like single "The Caterpillar" and uninviting gloom marches like "Wailing Wall.
All cats are grey? It never got friskier or more colorful for The Cure than 's "The Love Cats," an absurdly theatrical prance through jazzy new wave. Along with the group's other '83 singles, eventually collected on the Japanese Whispers mini-compilation, "Love Cats" effectively turned the corner on the band's darkest period and positioned them as a pop act with blockbuster potential; in the U.
More importantly, it showcased Smith's versatility as a frontman, preening and pawing with an elastic elan hardly audible on Pornography. A jewel buried deep in the B-side of the underappreciated album it lends part of its name to. But for all the song's vocal yearning and weeping strings, its most indelible melody is provided by the ghostly tapping of its drums -- faint, gentle and impossibly sad. It's just one of the many examples in the Cure's discography of longtime group percussionist Boris Williams improbably stealing the show from his bandmates.
The song that effectively closed the book on The Cure as a contemporary commercial force, "The 13th" was a disastrous choice of lead single, debuting at No.
It's not exactly tough to pinpoint why -- the song sounds like a flamenco remix of a mid-'80s Style Council single , which a Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me deep cut occasionally bursts out the middle of.
It had nothing to offer '90s rock audiences in the era of Beck and Oasis, but for Cure fans, its stylistic inscrutability and unpredictability makes it an enduring gem -- also featuring some of Robert Smith's most enjoyable schizophrenic vocals, and the group's best use of horns since "Close to Me" a decade earlier. Every post-punk group worth its salt needed its own "Frankie Teardrop," an eerily understated one-act that ends in absolute horror.
The two-minute "Subway Song" escapes novelty primarily on the strength of its bare-bones groove -- particularly then-bassist Michael Dempsey's looping hook, which sticks in your head far longer than Smith's unexpected shriek to close the song. The finest of the band's early album closers, "Faith" sounds utterly defeated in its slow-rolling saunter, stretching out to seven minutes almost out of a lack of inertia.
The Cure's dips into Eastern instrumentation weren't always the most graceful or successful, but the sitars or sitar-leaning keyboards, anyway on "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep" proved an invaluable texture in the song's rich psychedelic stew. A cuddly electro-pop number with an inscrutable lyric that sounds more like the Frazier Chorus than Disintegration , "Harold and Joe" is everything you could hope for from a great B-side: Quirky, endearing and totally removed from whatever else the band was doing at the time.
Often thought of as an attempt to keep pace with peers New Order and their culture-shifting synth-disco single "Blue Monday," the hammering bass and screeching synths of "The Walk" were not quite as geared for such mass consumption. The first single from the follow-up to a group's obvious high-water mark has a tough road to hoe, and Wish 's first offering performed admirably, if not quite spectacularly.
The closing single on the band's canonical first compilation, Staring at the Sea or Standing on the Beach , depending on format and country , "A Night Like This" feels like The Cure trying to compete with the big boys of American mainstream rock, down to the deployment of a searing sax solo following the song's bridge. It didn't get the band on U. While it's often overshadowed by its A-side brethren from Japanese Whispers , it was actually "Lament" -- first issued as a single along with copies of U.
Though maintaining the grumbling bass and skeletal six strings of their early-'80s albums -- the song's clanging guitar hook is the closest thing it has to a chorus, but still ends up more memorable than the majority of the group's conventional refrains -- "Lament" pushes the pace with a hissing and clapping drum machine, giving the song a tenacity missing in many of their lumbering jams of the period.
Both an historically important rarity in the group's catalog, and one of their most striking early compositions. The fact that this was fairly chosen as the lead single should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about Pornography as an album. The first of The Cure's trio of pivot singles, "Let's Go to Bed" made its intentions plain from its opening " doo-doo-doo-doo "s, placing a group that had most recently been hanging out in the Hanging Garden firmly in classic girl group territory.
The list of bass riffs more immediately identifiable than Simon Gallup's "Fascination Street" opening thrust -- shooting out from the UFO-sounding feedback fragments that begin the song like the laser beam that incinerates the White House in Independence Day -- is a pretty short one. Hell, it'd be tough to name all that many '80s six-string riffs more adrenalizing than this, laying the foundation for one of the hardest-rocking songs in The Cure's history, and a predictable choice for the first American single off Disintegration.
Rest of it's pretty good too, but the song only really needs one verse and a chorus -- the riff, which runs ceaselessly throughout the song's five minutes, does all the heaviest lifting. The beginning of The Cure's pop imperial phase, a song so big and catchy and generally extra -- with an absurdly choreographed video to match -- that there was no mistaking the group's commercial intentions.
The original "Close to Me" was among the most exhilarating singles of The Cure's first decade, a sashaying pop song with a gleefully rubbery bass line, a brain-burrowing call-and-response synth hook and an incredible dueling brass breakdown. But as jazzercise-friendly as that original version was, the song's wish-I-stayed-asleep-today lyric feels even more at home over the song's mid-tempo "Closer Mix" -- also released as a single off the group's Mixed Up set a half-decade later -- which carries over most of the best parts of the original, but also feels, well, yeah, closer.
Like you're actually in the wardrobe going over the cliff with the rest of the group. An immaculate pop-rock fantasy -- induced either by a mirage in the heat of the African desert or a vision on one particularly feverish late night in Robert Smith's bedroom, depending on how literally you want to take the lyrics. The evocative lyrics and spritely guitar work make the song captivating throughout, but the first two verses and choruses are quickly revealed to be a warmup for the song's firmly compulsory singalong bridge -- "F-I-R-E-I-N-C-A-I-R-O!
By the way, fire in Cairo perhaps isn't something you should be using cavalierly in song, but considering the Eastern allusions of the group's debut single , well, baby steps. The best of Wish 's many longing, slow-developing deep cuts, "Apart" could've probably been single-worthy as a three-minute power ballad, but it's positively hypnotic at a six-and-a-half minute crawl, its aqueous drums and bubbling bass spreading out to really blanket the listener.
Robert Smith meets it with one of his most devastating breakup lyrics, double-tracked as both a soft cry and a smoky whisper on the verse, which eventually turns into Smith harmonizing with himself on the brutally blunt chorus: "How did we get so far apart? That's the level The Cure were at in -- tossing off absolute diamonds on B-sides that could've served as career-defining hits for lesser acts. Same could be said, by the way, of the stadium-rock slow-burn "Fear of Ghosts," the single's other stowaway.
The Cure had flirted with classic '60s pop before, certainly, but "Friday I'm in Love" was the first song that had to have fans scratching their heads trying to remember if there was an original version by the Chiffons or Dusty Springfield.
The B-side of The Cure's first single was so strong that it not only demanded inclusion on their eventual debut, it led off the thing. While lacking the spectral grandeur that would come to define the group at their peak, everything else is already here: The instrumental interplay, the ear for hooks, and particularly the world-building lyrics.
Such a shimmering pop song might make intuitive sense at the length of a single edit, but you really need all seven and a half minutes of the album version here: It's got to take the proper time to build to the climactic bridge "If only I'd thought of the right words It lets you know from the second track that yeah, Disintegration was going to be Like That. The chase music that every half-century-old black-and-white horror flick had no idea it needed. It's also the perfect pivot between the Cure's makeshift punk years and their goth-rock golden age, with the energy and potency of the former with the atmosphere and shading of the latter, equally pulse-racing and spine-chilling.
It's got both gravity and lift, and it makes Smith's plain-faced vows of forever feel as resonant as Lord Byron. Good bands come up with a riff as growling, roaring and just fucking mean as the "One Hundred Years" two-chord monster, but great ones lay it over a popping dance beat for maximal weaponization. The Pornography opener is an absolutely totemic work of the goth rock genre, like Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Happy House" played at the darkest night in Studio 54 history, making so much of the rest of the genre sound wimpy and uncommitted by comparison.
And of course, Robert Smith is up to the occasion of piloting this towering machine of death, starting with the legendary declaration " It doesn't matter if we all die!
The sound of the curtain rising on one of the greatest albums of the s, with all the opening grandeur that you could possibly have asked for. There's not a ton of song to "Plainsong" -- no real verses or choruses, just kind of a slowly unfolding poem for the apocalypse -- but the sweep of it is peerlessly transportive, immersing you in the world of Disintegration and promising that the hour-plus to follow will be unlike any other sonic experience you've known.
It'd probably be a lot lower on this list if it was lying. Perhaps the most surprising-in-retrospect part of The Cure's Billboard chart history is that "Boys Don't Cry" never even charted on the Hot -- and only even hit the U.
That's startling partly because 40 years later, the song has become as iconic as any in the band's catalog, a pop-culture perennial familiar even to listeners who couldn't pick Robert Smith out of an '80s MTV lineup. But also it's because the song simply sounds like the most classic, enduring pop music: a lyric that could've been written by Smokey Robinson, a melody that could've been cribbed from Lennon and McCartney, a new wave production that could've been delivered by Ric Ocasek.
And I don't want the world to see me Cuz I don't think that they'd understand When everything's made to be broken I just want you to know who I am. Oh where, oh where, can my baby be? The Lord took her away from me She's gone to heaven so I've got to be good So I can see my baby when I leave this world. The leader of the band is tired And his eyes are growing old But his blood runs through my instrument And his song is in my soul My life has been a poor attempt To imitate the man I'm just a living legacy To the leader of the band.
Oh now feel it comin' back again like a rollin' thunder chasing the wind forces pullin' from the center of the earth again I can feel it. You're gone, gone, gone away I watched you disappear All that's left is a ghost of you Now we're torn, torn, torn apart.
I've been holding out so long I've been sleeping all alone Lord I miss you I've been hanging on the phone I've been sleeping all alone I want to kiss you. My lover's gone his boots no longer by my door he left at dawn and as I slept I felt him go. Nobody knows Nobody knows but me That I sometimes cry If I could pretend that I'm asleep When my tears start to fall I peek out from behind these walls I think nobody knows Nobody knows no.
So long ago, I don't remember when That's when they say I lost my only friend Well they said she died easy of a broken heart disease As I listened through the cemetery trees. I can still feel you hold my hand, little man And even the moment I knew You fought it hard like an army guy Remember I leaned in and whispered to you.
We drank a toast to innocence We drank a toast to now And tried to reach beyond the emptiness But neither one knew how. And you probably don't want to hear tomorrow's another day Well I promise you you'll see the sun again And you're asking me why pain's the only way to happiness And I promise you you'll see the sun again.
Never mind, I'll find someone like you I wish nothing but the best for you too Don't forget me, I beg I remember you said. For you, there'll be no more crying For you, the sun will be shining And I feel that when I'm with you It's alright, I know it's right. You're not gone you're still here With me all the time You're still here When I close my eyes I still see you I still feel you.
I want to thank you for giving me the best day of my life Oh just to be with you is having the best day of my life. And the hardest part Was letting go, not taking part You really broke my heart And I tried to sing But I couldn't think of anything And that was the hardest part. When I was younger I saw my daddy cry and curse at the wind He broke his own heart and I watched as he tried to reassemble it.
In my dreams I'll always see you soar Above the sky In my heart There will always be a place For you for all my life. If you're lost you can look - and you will find me Time after time If you fall I will catch you - I'll be waiting Time after time. And there has always been laughing, crying, birth, and dying Boys and girls with hearts that take and give and break And heal and grow and recreate and raise and nurture.
So take a good look at my face You'll see my smile seems out of place And if you look closer, it's easy to trace The tracks of my tears, I need you, need you. But I see your true colours Shining through I see your true colours And that's why I love you So don't be afraid to let them show Your true colours True colours are beautiful Like a rainbow. I remember how rough your hand felt on mine On my wedding day And the tears cried on my shoulder I couldn't turn away.
I see trees that are green, red roses too I watch them bloom for me and you And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. And as I float along this ocean I can feel you like a notion that won't seem to let me go Cause when I look to the sky something tells me you're here with me And you make everything alright.
If someone said three years from now You'd be long gone I'd stand up and punch them out Cause they're all wrong I know better Cause you said forever And ever Who knew. It was you they told me who was in trouble I couldn't breathe on the other side of the world And there was nothing I could do to help you And it's true today would be your birthday. See the stone set in your eyes See the thorn twist in your side I wait for you Sleight of hand and twist of fate On a bed of nails she makes me wait And I wait- without you.
Don't give up It's just the weight of the world When your heart's heavy I I will lift it for you. God's given us years of happiness here Now we must part And as the angels come and call for you The pains of grief tug at my heart. So take a look at me now, oh there's just an empty space And there's nothing left here to remind me just the memory of your face. All at once The world can overwhelm me There's almost nothin' that you could tell me That could ease my mind. Have you ever really loved an angel Once you have you'll never be the same again Have you ever had to let go of an angel Say goodbye, let 'em fly, my angel, my best friend.
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. I close my eyes, never to sleep I tell you all the things I should have said But you'll never know How could I act such a part As to love the one who breaks my heart I had to go So I try to laugh about it Cover it all up with lies I try to laugh about it Hiding the tears in my eyes 'cause boys don't cry.
Daniel my brother you are older than me Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal Your eyes have died but you see more than I Daniel you're a star in the face of the sky. When I saw the break of day I wished that I could fly away Instead of kneeling in the sand Catching teardrops in my hand.
Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend but I always thought that I'd see you baby, one more time again, now. Fly, fly little wing Fly beyond imagining The softest cloud, the whitest dove Upon the wind of heaven's love.
But you got to have friends The feeling's oh so strong You got to have friends to make that day last long. Goodbye my lover Goodbye my friend You have been the one You have been the one for me. I miss you like sleep And there's nothing romantic about the hours I keep The morning's when it starts I don't look so sharp Now I got a heavy heart. Oh Lord there's just so much to be done Oh lord, so many souls to be won Oh lord, this world is falling apart Dying for love from a broken heart Here am i, send me, though there's really not that much I can do What I have seems so small, but I want to give it all to you.
And she said, how can I help you to say goodbye It's okay to hurt, and it's okay to cry Come let me hold you, and I will try How can I help you to say goodbye. I grieve for you you leave me 'so hard to move on still loving what's gone they say life carries on carries on and on and on and on. And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep?
And why the Channel Seven chopper chills me to my feet? And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means? God help me, I was only nineteen. Artist - Puff Daddy ft.
How did I ever let you slip away Never knowing I'd be singing this song some day And now I'm sinking, sinking to rise no more Ever since you closed the door. Though I know I'll never lose affection for people and things that went before I know I'll often stop and think about them In my life, I love you more. When your lonely heart has learned its lesson You'd be hers if only she would call In the wee small hours of the morning That's the time you miss her most of all.
Who do you think you are? Running around leaving scars Collecting your jar of hearts Tearing love apart.
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