The Fat Angel Sings

1985’s “The Head on the Door” would be the band’s breakout moment, featuring the now radio staples “In Between Days” and “Close to Me,” alongside such should-be hits as “Six Different Ways” and “Push.” The latter would be the kind of riff-forward song that showcased Smith’s proficiency as a guitarist—something he’s long been underrated for and would be brought to the forefront on the band’s sprawling album from 1987, “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me”. It’s easy to see how “Kiss Me” would get the band tagged as alt-rock at the time, with songs like “The Kiss,” “Torture,” and “All I Want” being sinewy, rage-filled tracks that could be seen as an inspiration on acts like the Smashing Pumpkins. But here, also, were the band’s giddiest numbers, from the pitch-perfect “Just Like Heaven” to the horn-laced “Why Can’t I be You?” and “Hey You!!!” all the way down to softly lilting “Catch.”

Even those mope-fuelled records still have their bright spots, with “Disintegration’s” “Lovesong” being one of the band’s most iconic tracks, and “Wish” pulling itself out of the pit of despair with “High” and “Doing the Unstuck” . Even with “Wild Mood Swings‘ near universal derision, “Mint Car” is as tightly constructed as any of the songs from the band’s golden era. The same can even be said of “The End of the World” and “The Only One” from the band’s records in the 2000s, which are just as ebullient and infectious as their more renowned hits.

Though The Cure’s first forays into full-on goth music came by way of “Seventeen Seconds” and “Faith”, they were the building blocks upon which the band would create their first full masterpiece, 1982’s “Pornography”. Though the preceding pair of records was increasingly stark and devoid of pop hallmarks, “Pornography” was the sound of human beings bottoming out. “One Hundred Years” opens the record with the cacophonous boom of a drum machine and is paired with guitars that sound like they are warping off the record itself. The LSD-fuelled recording session, paired with Smith’s depressive streak and desire to make the “ultimate ‘fuck off’ record” results in the clearest inspiration on acts like Nine Inch Nails. There is no trace of hope to be found on “Pornography”, and it makes songs like “The Hanging Garden” and the aptly titled “Cold” capable of sucking the joy right out of a room.

Part of Smith’s grand plan was to have “Pornography” be the end of The Cure. And for a brief spell, it was. Simon Gallup left the band at the end of the record’s support tour, and Smith was spending more time playing guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees. After doing a one-off project called The Glove alongside the Banshees’ Steven Severin, he returned to The Cure and made “The Top”, a record that is as close to a solo album as Smith ever produced. Though not as overwhelming as “Pornography” the inclusion of “The Caterpillar” keeps it from being totally murky—the record remains indebted to its predecessor while also shifting toward psychedelic influences that had previously gone untapped.

“The Top” is far from the band’s best, but songs like “Shake Dog Shake,” “Give Me It,” and the closing title track are feral, unhinged freak-outs that demand attention, and show Smith’s capability for expressing pure, unvarnished anger.

The same can be said of deeper cuts from “Kiss Me”, with “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,” “The Snakepit,” and “Like Cockatoos” sounding inspired by hallucinogens even if Smith had long kicked the habit (though he’d return to it for “Disintegration”). But it also showcases “The Kiss,” as heavy and pounding of a track as The Cure ever committed to tape in their heyday. These songs aren’t always easy listens, as they rarely adhere to a single sonic touchstone, but that’s also what makes them so essential.

As noted above, The Cure has a lot of singles and EPs, and while those kinds of releases can often be havens for half-baked throwaways, that’s not the case here. Not only that, The Cure is a completists nightmare, as singles were often released on multiple formats, each with their own unique add-ons, and sometimes those even differed by which region—be it US or UK—that they were released in. As a result, The Cure’s catalogue of deep cuts can dwarf most band’s proper releases. And while there are things that are inessential—most of the remixes, along with the remix album “Mixed Up”, can be tossed aside there’s plenty of tracks that rank among the band’s best.

Thankfully, “Join the Dots: B-Sides & Rarities 1978–2001 (The Fiction Years)” does a great job of collecting a bulk of essentials. Though it omits “Cut Here,” a bonus track from 2001’s “Greatest Hits” compilation, as well as the limited edition Acoustic Hits companion piece, which saw the band tackling their most known in a stripped-down format, “Join the Dots” gives you most of what you need. It works through the band’s history chronologically, allowing you to see the band evolve almost in real time. Granted, “Join the Dots” is nearly five hours long, and even if you were just to cherry-pick the very best material, you’d still have a couple album’s worth of songs. From post-punk ragers like “Pillbox Tales,” to the anthemic chorus in “The Exploding Boy,” all the way to the Wild Mood Swings cut “A Pink Dream,” The Cure proves they’re a band worth getting lost in.

The Cure’s catalogue of music that helped shape an era.

‘Wild Mood Swings’ (1996)

The Cure’s 10th album sounds like kind of a mess because it was made under stormy conditions. Various members were in and out of the group at the time, and, after scoring the highest-charting album of its career with 1992’s ‘Wish,’ Robert Smith took a four-year break – the longest hiatus between Cure albums at the time – that ended with an overlong, and underdeveloped, set of songs.

The song that effectively closed the book on The Cure as a contemporary commercial force, “The 13th” was a disastrous choice of lead single, never catching a foothold anywhere on radio. It’s not exactly tough to pinpoint . 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.

If you picked up one of the many copies of Wild Mood Swings available in used racks across the country in the late ’90s, you might be pretty confused from the first track as to why the album was such a clearance regular: “Want” is a perfect opener, a slow-building epic of desperation, its synths dancing around the stereo span like an itch at the back of your subconscious. Truth told, Wild Mood Swings is pretty underrated on the whole just sabotaged by a terrible album cover and an inexplicable choice of lead single.

The glory days were over.

‘The Top’ (1984)

If it wasn’t for the slinky “The Caterpillar,” the Cure’s fifth album could be their worst. It’s certainly the most forgettable of all the early records. It’s sludgy, murky, confusing and all over the place musically. Plus, Robert Smith seems scattered and unfocused for most of its 40 long minutes.

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.” “The Top” seems to almost be addressing the band’s unease with the mainstream breakthrough that lay ahead of them: “This top is the place/ Where nobody goes/ You just imagine…” Wouldn’t have to imagine much longer.

A jewel buried deep in the B-side of the underappreciated album it lends part of its name to. “To Wish Impossible Things” is among the most heart breaking songs in the group’s catalogue, a lyric of merciless nostalgic melancholy summed up in the already-ruined naivete of its title. 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 long time group percussionist Boris Williams improbably stealing the show from his bandmates.

They managed to return with one of their all-time best albums, ‘The Head on the Door,’ a year later.

‘Japanese Whispers’ (1983)

All cats are grey? Hardly. It never got friskier or more colourful for The Cure than 1983’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.K. it was the band’s first top ten hit.

More importantly, it showcased Smith’s versatility as a frontman, preening and pawing with an elastic elan hardly audible on Pornography.

‘4:13 Dream’ (2008)

Some of the songs on the band’s 13th album dated back to the mid-’80s, and Robert Smith had so much material that he considered making it a double record at one point. Instead, he replaced the gloomier songs with more polished and upbeat ones. Not a good move. Like other Cure albums from the period, ‘4:13 Dream’ tries too hard to replicate the band’s best era, but the songs – besides a couple singles – just aren’t there.

‘The Cure’ (2004)

The group’s self-titled album from 2004 was co-produced by Ross Robinson, who’s worked with Korn, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot. So, it’s a heavier album than fans probably expected (or even wanted) from the Cure. It’s overlong, and it’s kind of hard to get through, but ‘The Cure’ offers a somewhat new perspective on a band that had recently passed the quarter-century mark of their career.

More influential than all but a handful of bands in modern rock history, The Cure didn’t often let the younger generation return the favour while on his own, Robert Smith would collaborate with acolytes like Crystal Castles or Blink-182, as a collective entity The Cure remained largely monolithic. A fascinating exception was “Lost,” opener to their self-titled 2004 album, which let producer Ross Robinson (Deftones, Slipknot) tap into a discordant rawness that had largely eluded the band in their third decade. Its full-band chug approaches Taking Back Sunday levels as the song crescendos in intensity, Smith howling “IIIII CAN’T FIND MYSELF!” That Smith & Co. never let themselves get pushed further in this direction remains both a missed opportunity and one of the more compelling What-Ifs in the band’s story.

‘Bloodflowers’ (2000)

The Cure’s 11th LP was called a return to form following 1996’s messy and disappointing ‘Wild Mood Swings.’ It’s certainly mood-building – one track clocks in at more than 11 minutes, and the average song length is a taxing six minutes – but ‘Bloodflowers’ often comes off like it’s trying a little too hard to sound like a Cure album.

The Cure’s first album of the 21st century aimed to recreate the majesty of the group’s largely unquestioned 1989 masterpiece “Disintegration” but seemed to forget how vivacious that album was in its dreamy sprawl; by contrast “Bloodflowers” was fairly flat in its production and dynamics.

On lead single “Maybe Someday,” that evenness worked to its advantage, allowing the gentle ache of the song’s lyric to gradually deepen over the chorus of its five minutes.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but there’s not much originality here either.

‘Wish’ (1992)

Like 1989’s thunderously melancholy “Disintegration”, the more bittersweet Wish delved into common Cure themes of regret and loss – but this time, Robert Smith made room for glimmers of optimism. It paid off: Powered along by the goofy pop sunburst that was “Friday I’m in Love,” which became their second-highest charting U.K. single ever, the Cure became famous beyond their wildest dreams.

Of course, Wish boasts its elegies (“Apart,” “End”) and its paranoid ruminations on love (“From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea”) – but also its determined affirmations (“High,” “Trust”) and a song that could genuinely be described as jaunty (“Doing the Unstuck”). This blend of alienation and offbeat joy helped the album open at a startling No. 2 on the album charts.

‘Disintegration’ made them worldwide stars three years earlier, the Cure returned with a similar-sounding LP that downplayed the earlier album’s gloomier elements. The result was the band’s highest-charting album, reaching No. 2 in the U.S. “Friday I’m in Love” was the big single, but there’s more to ‘Wish’ than that. Probably the most consistently joyful album the group has ever made.

Three years after their U.S. breakthrough, the Cure had returned with Wish which reached No. 2 – their highest-charting LP. The album’s first single, “High,” is kinda blah. It’s the second single that anchors the album with its wonderfully poppy hook and Smith’s giddy performance – basically, it’s a song that’s as happy as it lets on. It’s the band’s second-highest-charting single in the U.S.

‘Faith’ (1981)

Like the albums before (‘Seventeen Seconds’) and after (‘Pornography’) it, ‘Faith’ forms a trilogy of records that helped seal the Cure’s reputation as gloomy, black-clad artsy post-punks. The songs are mood-building set pieces, so radio airplay was pretty much non-existent. But as doomy, artsy goth, the Cure’s third album is a cornerstone work by a band that excelled at it.

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. “Nothing left but faith” shouts an unconvinced Robert Smith into the void, as the song dissolves underneath him — as bleak an illustration of bottomless despair as the ’80s produced.

About as phantasmal as early Cure got, all endless drum reverb and lightly moaning synths and tensely plodding bass — you can practically see the shadows being projected against the back-alley wall. Robert Smith sounds strangely like Brian Eno on this one, letting the soundscape do most of the emotional storytelling as he coos from behind the thick fog, “The columns are all men/ Begging to crush me/ No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes.”

‘Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me’ (1987)

Following the 1985 rebound ‘The Head on the Door,’ Robert Smith led the band through a double-LP extravaganza that included some of his most joyous songs. The excellent “Just Like Heaven” is here and helped drive the album into the Top 40 (a first in the U.S. for the Cure). There’s some filler here – Side Four is a big come-down – but ‘Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me’ set up the group for its masterpiece two years later.

“Why Can’t I Be You?” The first single from the band’s first album to get much notice in the U.S. is also one of its all-time brightest songs – all blasting synth-horns and frontman Robert Smith’s playful vocals just skimming the surface of the springy melody. There’s not much to the song (it’s in and out of there in a little more than three minutes), but it’s a whole lotta fun, dispelling the myth that the Cure are a bunch of moody sad sacks.

While the rest of the singles on The Cure’s U.S. breakthrough album “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” seemed to be actively fighting their way out of your speakers, the lovely ballad “Catch” takes one of the lightest touches in the group’s catalogue. Smith in particular comes off so low key, it almost sounds like he’s singing through a vocal filter on this love-that-never-was story.

Its fragile strings and shuffling drums give it a delicacy rare to singles of its period, and allow for unforgettable moments like Smith unexpectedly echoing his “Just rolling about on the floor!”sigh, taken aback by the memory’s power.

Remarkably, “Just Like Heaven” wasn’t the first single released from “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me”. It wasn’t the second single, either. When it finally started picking up airplay six months after the album came out, the track became the Cure’s first Top 40 hit (it actually didn’t get any higher than No. 40, but little victories, right?) and one of the defining songs of the burgeoning alternative nation. From the rolling, almost tripping-over-themselves drums that start the song to the glorious synths that just sorta drift into space at the fade-out, “Just Like Heaven” indeed sounds like it comes from a most heavenly place.

‘Three Imaginary Boys’ (1979)

The band’s debut album is sketchy at times (Robert Smith practically disowned the LP after the record company released it without his approval), but the post-punk moodiness that elevated later records starts here. There’s a conceptual tightness here, too, which carried over to some of their best albums.

After releasing their kinda-dismal debut single “Killing an Arab” in 1978, the Cure followed up a year later with this deceptively cheery breakup song. It sets the template – uptempo rhythm track, bummer words – for some of the band’s best cuts. And how about that spare but striking guitar line that runs throughout the chorus?.

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.

Even better: the reworked U.S. version – called ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and released a year later – which includes some great early singles.

‘Seventeen Seconds’ (1980)

A year after their debut, the Cure returned darker, more focused and moving closer to the sound that would help define their reputation. ‘Seventeen Seconds’ comes together as Robert Smith leads the expanded lineup through a group of songs that set the stage for the goth movement right around the corner. The first in a trilogy of landmark records that formed a genre.

‘The Head on the Door’ (1985)

Robert Smith wrote every single song for the first time, and his singular vision helped get the Cure back on track after 1984’s dismal ‘The Top.’ They try on a few different styles here, with the pop songs – especially the bouncy “In Between Days” – finding new radio-ready textures to cling to. Modern-rock radio was starting up around this time, and ‘The Head on the Door’ turned out to be a perfect fit.

https://youtu.be/_1qY8IxLuWYThe 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. “Six Different Ways” almost sounds like children’s TV music with its scale-running flute hook and jaunty piano plunks, but matches that with an off-kilter waltz time signature and a delectably awestruck Smith lyric: “This is stranger than I thought/ Six different ways inside my heart.”

“Close to Me” includes The staccato handclaps, the bubbling bass, the ghostly keyboards and the general wooziness of “Close to Me” add up to one of the most musically claustrophobic songs ever recorded. Smith practically whispers his lines, like he’s afraid of waking some hungry beast that might be hunched over in the corner. Put this one on your Halloween mix.

‘Pornography’ (1982)

The Cure at their gloomiest and doomiest. And no wonder: Everyone was fighting and taking drugs, while Robert Smith was fighting back some major bouts of depression. It all amounts to the pinnacle of the band’s darkest period. ‘Pornography‘ was the final album in the Cure’s trilogy of landmark goth records. Next up was their first real stumble, then a period of renewed creativity and a golden era of hits and music.

‘Disintegration’ (1989)

Everything the Cure had learned over the past decade was summed up on their milestone eighth album. ‘Disintegration’ has it all: goth dirges, endless psychedelic jams, super-catchy pop songs. And it made them massive stars, setting up a commercial groundswell for the next few years. Some of their best songs are here – “Pictures of You,” “Lovesong,” “Fascination Street” – but more importantly, ‘Disintegration’ sounds like an album made by a band at the peak of its creative powers.

It spawned four hit singles including this slinking mid-tempo number with nightmare-inducing imagery (“quietly he laughs and shaking his head, creeps closer now, closer to the foot of the bed”). Sweet dreams!.

“Disintegration’s” first single takes a while before it really goes anywhere, rumbling bass pretty much dominates the first couple minutes of the song. But once it kicks in, there’s a ton of things going on in the busy mix. “Fascination Street” is one of the Cure’s biggest modern rock hits and a staple at concerts, where it’s occasionally dragged out for 10-plus minutes.

The Cure had hit a creative and commercial peak in 1989 with “Disintegration”. It’s their biggest-selling album and the first to crack the Top 20 in the U.S. It spawned four hit singles (all of which make our list of the Top 10 Cure Songs), including this slinking mid-tempo number with nightmare-inducing imagery (“quietly he laughs and shaking his head, creeps closer now, closer to the foot of the bed”). Sweet dreams!