Jul. 14, 2010 - Issue #769: Musician’s Survival Guide

Old Sounds

The Cure: Disintegration

(Elektra) Originally released: 1989

When Robert Smith first handed in Disintegration, the album that would become the Cure's magnum opus, Elektra's executives were near-appalled: they deemed it commercial suicide, thinking that absolutely nobody would want to listen to the band who had recently started scoring hits with upbeat stuff like "Friday I'm in Love" get all down and dreary. Ignoring how much that misunderstands the band, these guys must know even less about teenagers: melancholy melodrama has never been a particularly tough sell. 


The Cure is of course so good at that that its name has become kind of a shorthand for a type of mopey goth rock and the sad sappy suckers that listen to it. But for as much as Disintegration is the absolute zenith of that particular style, it also needed the other Cure, that happy-go-lucky band with its bouncing hooks, to really drive it home. Tucked away among the decidedly disillusioned tone of the album is "Lovesong," a romantic ballad whose sentiments drift somewhere between overwrought teenage love note and painfully sincere wedding vow, but which is also the most emtionally open song here, Smith mostly content to couch his feelings in imagery and metaphor elsewhere. Like some of the Cure's earlier work, its juxtaposition only makes the mood of Disintegration even stronger: if it was nothing but downer synthscapes, it would be much easier to dismiss, but that this kind of bleak world can come out of the mind of someone who is obviously in an intense kind of love just grants everything more weight. It's the difference between a sullen teenager complaining about his parents and a married man confiding his unshakeable dread and ennui.

This sense begins immediately with "Plainsong," which should be the example held up whenever anyone calls music atmospheric. Lyrically pretty simple, though with an unmistakable creeping sadness, it is made by its plodding but expansive synths, which take over like night falling across the prairie. I don't know that I've ever heard more emotion wrung out of a digital instrument, and it sets the mood perfectly.

For its maturity, that mood is still one that constantly flirts with going over the top, that treats every little thing like it might be the end of the world (hence, again, its popularity with teenagers). "Pictures of You," which immediately follows "Plainsong," is a break-up song that could nearly double as a suicide note, although the reverbed pluck of the guitars and synth washes again set the mood ideally, and keep it feeling like a whole lot, but not too much. "Prayers for Rain"'s lyrics wouldn't be too out of place in an angry nu-metal song, but Smith's delivery—part snotty punk, part bridge jumper—and the spacious arrangement again rescue it from excess.

That, ultimately, seems to be Disintegration's calling card: painful, powerful emotions delivered with the perfect pitch, somewhere exactly between speaking plainly and overselling it. No wonder the record company missed it. V
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