Disintegration

New Cure Work Brings Colors and Sounds Of A Requiem

The suspicions began when it was announced, month past, that Laurence Tolhurst, founder and faithtfull of The Cure scale, had left the band and would not participate in the european tour programmed for this month. In interview to the english weekly publication Melody Maker, edition of April 29, the leader Robert Smith affirms: "I am sure that Disintegration is the last disc of The Cure. I would be surprised if we made another". And more: for the first time in the band history, the sleeve of the new album features the Robert Smith face. It will have the colored mouth singer acquired the Morrissey syndrome? Will he be preparing for a solo career? With the pop titled 'mainstream', groups as Cure, Simple Minds, Duran Duran or Morrissey live under the constant lack of renewal threatens of theirs musical revenues and they try hopelessly to escape of the conventions. The new Cure album (whose title, other symptom, means disintegration, exactly), issued last Wednesday in Europe, which should arrive at the Brazilian stores in the beginning of June, has the requiem appearances, colors and content.
With the album Disintegration Cure buries this decade based on a distant musical posture from that that projected the band in the beginning of its career and, paradoxally, stays faithfull to its musical personality.
Among the ten track oo the disc, just one, "Lovesong", has a rhythm 2 by 2 that approaches a little of the rock'n'roll energy, so dear for the group in albums as Seventeen Seconds, of 80. The rest is a slowness that takes to the introspection. It possesses a internal violence that will make the Goths' delicacies that enjoy the horizontal and humid depression contemplations. Also is distant from the cheerful and still happyful gender that dominated LP The Head On The Door, of 85. Disintegration reminds the climates of Faith, 81, and Pornography, 82, without the prevalent urgency on those discs.
In the sequence, "Plainsong", "Pictures Of You", "Closedown" start the album, the band plunge totally in the seventies symphonic rock grandiloquent temptation with full doses of synthesizers - a tendency that already came sketched in the precedent LP, the double Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me - in the arrangements and compositions on smaller tone, dragged. The songs structure is almost always the same and they became already the band registered mark: long introduction in that the guitars draw a simple melody, of three chords: simultaneous entrance of the drums (with heavy demarcation) and of the keyboards, forming a saturated sound base, with few spaces for improvised solos and finally the vocal Robert Smith.
The originality of the it Cure stays in Smith's voice and in his lyris, deposits of his all fantasies and phobias, fruits derived from his schizophrenic mind inhabited by characters of comic histories (Betty Boop) and cartoons (Peter Pan). One of them is the Spider Man that serve him to exorcise his phobia about the spiders in the music "Lullaby"... A great pretext for the psychoanalysis.
In the track that gives the album title, Robert Smith retakes the theme that constitutes a true obsession on his whole work... Used so much to express the lack of feeling or pleasure excess, of oppression or seduction, the kiss is confirmed as a dominant icon in the group simbology.
In other tracks, The Cure music continues inviting the listener to imaginary trips that can allow to as state of dream (in musical terms for the guitars in sustained arpeggios), like in "Fascination Street" and "Prayers For Rain", as nightmare (when the sound of the bass is stood out), like in "Disintegration". Or still to suggest the transformation of the tedium in pleasure - that that can be tried looking at the rain drops that are slippery for the window, as it induces "The Same Deep Water As You". The lyrics transmit sarcasm, despair and desire, described with the sad clown's characteristic impressionist style Robert Smith.
Everything was made in Disintegration to propitiate the idea of the end. The side B begins with the tracks "Prayers For Rain" and "The Same Deep Water As You" (this last one starting and ending with the sound of the rain), that carry the biblical simbolgy of the destruction for the water. The following track is "Disintegration" and the last music doesn't have title. Be it false or true, the twilight impression is transmitted in an efficient way.
In the moment, Cure leaves in a European tour that will pass, next Saturday, on Frankfurt, in the Some Bizarre festival , where the band will come in company of Pixies, Sugarcubes and Shelleyan Orphan, among others.
(Jean-Yves de Neufville - May/89)