Happiness is a sickness. This is The Cure. The band started out as proto-punks with the promising Three Imaginary Boys, but really found their moping stride on the dark, gothic Seventeen Seconds. Faith and Pornography followed, powerful albums that represented some of the gloomiest music this side of Joy Division.
Pornography nearly broke the band. Instead, they re-formed around Robert Smith and Laurence Tolhurst to record brighter music that mixed dark internal musings with giddy arrangements: “Let’s Go To Bed,” “The Walk,” “The Love Cats,” “The Caterpillar.” Head On The Door provided something of a commercial breakthrough for the band, aided in part by music videos that introduced many viewers to Robert Smith’s lipsticked alter ego. Since then, the band has been able to pack arenas while attracting a legion of goth-rockers (and plain music lovers) around them.
Along with The Smiths, The Cure turned self-examination into an art form. They also provided the disenfranchised, misunderstood, neurotic and painfully shy with a wonderful soundtrack for our perfectly tragic lives. Thank you. We wouldn’t have wished it any other way.
Kronomyth 1.0: PUNKICILLIN. A lot of new wave bands started out as punks: Adam and The Ants, The Damned, The Stranglers, XTC. I’d even throw The Police and Devo into that group. The Cure, however, started as a really good punk band. Three Imaginary Boys, their first record, is one of the best records to come out of the late 70s English punk movement. “Accuracy,” “Grinding Halt” (a personal favorite of mine), “Object,” “Fire In Cairo” and “It’s Not You” are some of the best punk/pop songs this side of The Buzzcocks. The gloomy and dense Cure albums that followed have little in common with these Boys save for a few dark turns on “Subway Song,” the atmospheric “10.15 Saturday Night” (selected as the album’s single, although it’s not nearly the best song on here) and the spooky, slinky title track. Unfortunately, Three Imaginary Boys was packaged without the boys’ full approval, from the unauthorized album cover (which I actually like) to the unwanted inclusion of “Foxy Lady” (sung by Michael Dempsey and very reminiscent of XTC’s “All Along The Watchtower”) and the sloppy 12-bar blues at the end (eventually credited as the album’s thirteenth track, “The Weedy Burton”). Whether or not this is the album that Robert Smith would have released, it’s the album that launched The Cure and caught the ear of punk fans after the Pistols went silent. Despite some youthful mistakes (“So What,” “Meat Hook”), Three Imaginary Boys is a varied and very good first album of English punk with just the right amounts of attitude, energy and oddball antisocialism. It’s kind of a shame they didn’t stick with punk.
Kronomyth 2.0: A HEAVENLY SEVENTEEN. The opening argument for The Cure’s new, dark manifesto is two minutes of instrumental music that creeps like a cool mist over a moonlit cemetery. In other words, this is the first record that actually sounds like a Cure record in all of its psychedelic, gothic glory. The vision is still a little murky here, but all the familiar pieces were beginning to take shape: Robert Smith’s pained and vulnerable voice, the flanged guitars, atmospheric keyboards and seductively slinky bass lines. Songs like “A Forest,” “In Your House” and “Play For Today” begin to carve out a distinctive and effective style for The Cure that builds on the sound of contemporaries like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Wire, and adds the gilding of a beautiful melancholy to it. The lyrical imagery invokes darkness, night and cold; lovers are lost in the forest, dreams are dead. It isn’t nihilism so much as a natural affinity for the night and the dark reflections it inspires. Suspended in the act of introspection, time loses meaning as the remembrances of sweetness and sadness are eternally savored. Seventeen years become seventeen seconds that feel like an eternity in the gothic midnight of the mind. With Laurence Tollhurst and Simon Gallup on board, the core lineup of The Cure was now intact. Subsequent albums would refine the vision, delve into darker places with lurid detail and finally emerge at the end of the mind’s tunnel into a brighter, better place. Three Imaginary Boys, as good as it is, remains something of a false start. Seventeen Seconds is the beginning of a much longer, deeper journey and a logical starting place for longtime fans.
Kronomyth 2.5: THE CRUSH. The most important musical revolution in my lifetime was happening 3,000 miles away and all I could do was listen to late-night radio and save up money for expensive import records. Eventually, of course, the revolution was repackaged for the Americans. We got The Clash, prettied up to perfection by mixing the strongest album cuts with singles, and, soon after, Boys Don’t Cry. This compilation features a good half of 
“Faith was the sound of extreme desolation because that’s how we felt at the time.” – Robert Smith, in 
Kronomyth 3.5: A DOUBLE DOSE OF THE CURE. Happily Ever After brought American audiences up to speed with The Cure by fusing Seventeen Seconds and Faith on a single double elpee. It’s a big, beautiful slab of angst and sonic artistry that would have blown me away as a teenager if I’d heard it then (“Grinding Halt” had at least filtered down to me), only I don’t recall seeing this album in record stores—maybe A&M didn’t make a lot of copies, or underpromoted it, or both. Unlike the earlier Boys Don’t Cry, this is a straight repackage of their second and third albums. In fact, once out of the record sleeve, you’re essentially holding Seventeen Seconds in one hand and Faith in the other. Hearing the two records in a single setting, you can hear how The Cure managed to add new details and warmth to their music even as they pared down from a quartet to a trio. Seventeen Seconds is a dark and cold record, Faith’s is a womb-like darkness: it envelopes you, embraces you. As much as I enjoy songs like “A Forest,” Happily Ever After doesn’t really make me happy until “Primary” rolls around, and from then on it’s pure magic. Although you could grumble that A&M didn’t add anything except a new (lame) cover, at least they spared us Carnage Visors. These days, Happily Ever After is superfluous in lieu of deluxe repackages of Faith and Seventeen Seconds, although a compact disc version exists for those with fond remembrances.
Kronomyth 5.0: SEX AND DEATH. The Cure continues to perfect their PoePopGothRock on Pornography, provided your definition of perfection includes gloomy, glommy ruminations on suicide and murder. With an opening line of “It doesn’t matter if we all die,” Robert Smith leads us into a strange world where paranoia and poetry play an equal part in creation. If you’ve heard any of the early Cure albums, you’ll know they’re difficult by design, with uncomfortable imagery (e.g., the slaughterhouse setting of “The Hanging Garden”) and lots of psychological self-eviscerating as Smith battles dark, uncontrollable urges in a madhouse of pounding rhythms and warped melodies. And, yes, right now you’re thinking “Add a punchbowl and you’ve got a party,” but Pornography really is a pleasure, albeit of a different kind. The opening “One Hundred Years” and “A Short Term Effect” usher the listener into a lurid world where melodies (and time) are distorted in the carnival mirrors of morbid reflection. After those two tracks, I happily followed The Cure as the music grew progressively darker, through the hanging garden, past the figurehead and into the cold, strange day. It ends at the edge of nightmares on the final, title track, where murky shapes and disembodied, discombobulated voices paint over the last exit in deep, impenetrable black. Reading later reviews of The Cure’s music, you get the sense that most listeners were happy to put the past of Pornography and Faith behind them, yet I would tell you this chapter is just as essential to appreciating the band as Head On The Door. Malady was their muse, suffering their supper, and if the giddy songs that followed were fueled by an almost desperate energy, it was because the next dark turn was right around the corner. I’d stop short of calling Pornography a great record because it is a bit of an underdone downer in the middle, but in many ways the album is an early Gothic masterpiece.
Kronomyth 6.0: THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER AFTER …HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Japanese Whispers collects the trio of post-Pornography singles (“Let’s Go To Bed,” “The Walk,” “The Love Cats”) and their backsides. It represents a radical departure from the gloomy past, introducing the giddy (if still idiosyncratically analytical) sound of The Cure’s next phase. At this stage, The Cure were in a kind of stasis/hiatus, releasing singles in lieu of a proper album. But what singles they released! You’ll find the rich, dark sonic structures of the past on songs like “The Dream,” “Just One Kiss” and “Lament,” but the real story is the domesticated bliss exhibited on “Let’s Go To Bed,” “The Walk” and “The Love Cats.” They are absolutely charming, not the first word to come to mind when describing Pornography or Faith. I always had the sense, listening to Pornography, that Smith had entered an even darker world by album’s end. Apparently, he was walking toward the light at the end of a dark tunnel. Everything before Whispers is bit of a downer, really, as brilliant as it is. Beginning with “Let’s Go To Bed,” Smith and Tolhurst began writing the band’s happily ever after: manic to be sure, but driven by a secret joy inside. The image of cats/pets plays prominently in the lyrics, suggesting that Smith had indeed found some form of domestic happiness, or at least had got a pet to pass the time (they do make you happier). Maybe the band should have recorded all of their albums as singles (Head On The Door does sort of feel that way), since it brings out the sweetest side of Robert Smith. I know, Japanese Whispers is technically a singles compilation (i.e., product), but it’s an important transitional record that, for latter-day Cure fans, will speak their language more than the dark musings of the past.
Kronomyth 9.0: CLOSE TO PERFECT. Somewhere outside of London (?), The Smiths and Siouxsie And The Banshees were being hurled one at the other in the eye-on collider of Robert Smith’s imagination. Everyone’s favorite gothic moptop had already come a-courting on songs like “The Lovecats” and “The Caterpillar,” but even they didn’t prepare you for the sweetness of “Inbetween Days,” “Close To Me” and “Six Different Ways.” With just a few synthesizers (including the Yamaha DX-7 and E-mu Emulator II) and a five-piece band that now included drummer Boris Williams, Smith converted his boiler room of intense emotions into a psychedelic candy store of sounds. Scratch the marzipan surface and, yes, it’s still the same bitter fruit you’re chewing on: fear, anxiety, loathing. But Smith has somehow found joy in his despair, and the result on The Head On The Door is the giddy realization that we can be happy in our miserable state. It’s a liberating thought, and Smith uses his newfound freedom to expand his musical borders with some very unCure-like elements, from saxophone (“A Night Like This”) to nylon-stringed guitar (“The Blood”). The contrast between light and dark is what’s most striking on this album, and it remains a kind of fulcrum on which tastes teeter between The Cure’s dark past and their bright future. I personally love the record and think it’s the best thing they’ve done, but I’m an inveterate fence-sitter, more throw pillow than man most days. 20 years later, long after the last hope that The Cure might labor in obscure darkness again, The Head On The Door was released in a deluxe double-disc edition with home recordings, studio demos and live tracks. The handful of home recordings are illuminating and (a word I would have thought to safely sequester before writing a Cure review) charming; Smith’s informal version of “Inbetween Days” is a little slice of homespun heaven. Of the remaining demos, many of which never made it onto record, “The Exploding Boy” and “A Few Hours After This” could have become contenders for a coveted album spot. The added live tracks, which focus on the original album’s darker aspects, are interesting as well, if only because you don’t hear an audience get excited at the prospect of hearing songs called “The Blood” and “The Baby Screams” every day.
Kronomyth 10.0: LIFE’S A BEACH, AND THEN YOU DIE. Standing On A Beach collects the first 13 singles from The Cure in chronological order, which might seem a kindness but, in fact, plays out more like a gloomy history lesson. I bought this because I was in love with “The Lovecats.” I ended up playing the crap out of that song, “In Between Days” and “Close To Me.” The rest of the record is dour, difficult—in other words, exactly what you’d expect if you’d already heard albums like Faith and Pornography. Poor me, I’d just bought Head On The Door and imagined that all Cure albums sounded like that. They don’t. They’re dark, complex records that deal with difficult subjects (“The Hanging Garden”) and can seem unduly noisy (“Primary”). I did enjoy “The Caterpillar” from The Top and the unbreakable “Boys Don’t Cry,” which was re-released as a single for this album and finally charted. Yet I would ultimately rank Standing On A Beach as one of the more depressing greatest hits albums you’re likely to encounter, simply because The Cure’s early albums were so, well, depressing. On a more interesting note, this was issued in several different formats including an extended CD release (oddly re-titled Staring At The Sea) and a double cassette release that featured an album’s worth of B sides (on the off chance that you still own a cassette player). Beachcombers beware: If you’re really interested in the early Cure, pick up Seventeen Seconds, Faith or Pornography instead and leave the singles for the seagulls.
Kronomyth 12.02: FASCIST TREE NATION. You Cure fans are a double lucky lot because Cure singles are so much fun to collect. Take this one for example: it’s a remix of the original and the B side is the nonalbum “Babble.” As if that weren’t enough, an Extended Remix version of “Fascination Street” exists on a CD single and 12-inch that also includes (for US collectors) another nonalbum entry, “Out of Mind,” that had earlier appeared on the UK single “Lullaby.” And their discography is rife with fruit like this: nonalbum tracks of actual merit (“Babble” could have easily been an album track), interesting remixes, picture discs. I can’t tell you what the difference is in the single remix version of “Fascination Street” since I don’t own Disintegration, but I can tell you that the song itself is terrific. Always reminds me of PiL, two bands I don’t usually lump together for some reason but who, in fact, are very similar. I tried my hand at transcribing the lyrics from Babble, but the ends of the third and fourth couplets are a little hard to make out.
Kronomyth 13.0: A MIXED SUCCESS. A kindness to kure kollectors, who number not a few, Mixed Up kompiles a handful of hard-to-find 12-inch mixes with some newly released and re-recorded mixes. Robert Smith has gone on record as saying that the album’s intent was to put this material within easier reach of fans who might not be inclined to pay $20+ for an aftermarket single, but fans still had to reach into their wallets if they wanted to hear the new stuff (and enough of them did to send it platinum). There are new visions of old nightmares now de-fanged (“The Walk,” “A Forest”), quirky revisions of the classics (two of which, “Close to Me” and “Inbetween Days,” were released as singles to promote this album) and the usual sort of sonic spelunkering one might expect from the psychedelically inclined Smith. It didn’t change my world, it won’t change yours; Mixed Up is about filling in the cracks in your collection, not adding another brick to the wall between you and The Cure and the rest of the world. Time moves excrementally toward the clogged catch basin of our collected memories and Mixed Up seeps through without so much as a stain to remember it by. I wouldn’t make acquiring this a priority since it’s not where the real party is happening, but cure-iosity is bound to get the better of you sooner or later.
This is an interesting idea: 38 songs from Elektra’s back catalog performed in the idiom of 38 artists from their current roster, some of whom (The Cure, Linda Ronstadt) have the distinction of being both interpreter and interpretee. That said, if you were to allocate 120 minutes and 20 bucks to every interesting idea that crossed your path, you’d be more than a dollar short and a day late. I listened to this simply because I wanted to hear The Cure’s version of The Doors’ “Hello I Love You.” Elektra did me the kindness of putting that track first, so after five minutes I could have begged off a little wiser (if none the richer) and spent the next 115 minutes saving the world or filing paper or something in between. Instead, I stuck it out for the whole elektrafixation and was rewarded with a few more surprises: Billy Bragg steamrolling through “Seven And Seven Is,” The Sugarcubes messing with “Motorcycle Mama,” a Spanish version of “Hotel California” by the Gipsy Kings, Television’s “Marquee Moon” in a classical light, Jon Zorn demolishing The Stooges’ “TV Eye,” that sort of thing. The concept fails as often as not, though, largely because I didn’t care about the originals to begin with. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of half of these songs, and I grew up in the 70s. Appearances by Metallica, They Might Be Giants and Pixies are wasted on poorly matched songs that don’t deserve the attention. Too many obscure artists on both sides of the interpretations ultimately undermine Rubaiyat. Yes, this is a celebration of Elektra’s eclectic history, but I’ve worked in marketing too many years not to smell a cross-sell. Outside of a desire to hear more of The Sugarcubes, I wasn’t sold on digging any deeper into Elektra’s roster old or new.
Kronomyth 14.01: THE MYTHING LINK. Kronomyth, or The Adventures of Mebyl Spaetzmann, chapter the first. This is the advance satellite from KM.14, indicating that there were plenty of planets of interest ahead in the constellation of The Cure. “High” sailed smoothly into the UK quadrant, stalled after a near-collision in the US quadrant, and entered the select company of iProbable songs from this magical band. Here it appears in a shortened single mix, a dizzier high mix, and comes on the cd single with two new asteroids clinging to its orbit: “This Twilight Garden” and “Play.” The asteroids are album-worthy, the first languid and lovely (at least to the ears of longtime Curists), the second stuck in a slow orbit but not without merit. Captain Mebyl found a strange, 12-inch plastic disc that contains a rare trip mix, which collectors might wish to mine for their own.
Kronomyth 13.0: WISH ME, WISH ME, WISH ME. Wish is The Cure painted in Van Gogh blue with three luminous moons named High, Friday and Elise to lure unwary travellers into thinking this is an improbably giddy romp through the lighter side of Robert Smith’s imagination. But of course those of us who have swum with The Cure for some time know there are no happy endings, only manic episodes of happiness that escape like lucky fish from the reaper’s net of grim reality. The obvious bookends of “Open” and “End” create a self-contained world that begins with Robert Smith’s declaration of depression (“The way the rain comes down is the way I feel inside”) and ends with him chipping away at his own iconic stature (“Please stop loving me, I am none of these things”). Heavy stuff that would drag down most albums, except that The Cure are the perfect purveyors of gothic sadness, and in their world down is definitely up. I’ll admit that I get weak in the knees every time those three moons appear, but I wouldn’t wish for one more happy track on here. The hopeful, silly “Doing The Unstuck” may actually be one too many. Better are the buttery “Trust,” “From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea” and “Apart,” which make the highs of High and Friday so much sweeter (Elise couldn’t be called a proper upper). I wouldn’t recommend listening to Wish if you’ve recently been dumped in a relationship (the early Stones’ll stiffen your spine just fine), but as a mope opus Wish is hard to beat. The rich sonic textures, touches of psychedelia, tinges of madness and surgeon-skilled self-criticism have rarely been equalled in the annals of gothic rock, although The Cure themselves have bested it on occasion. Still, this is a High point in the history of The Cure and a cementing of their status as stars (though stars who invite you to study the blackness between them).