The Cure
The Top / The Head on the Door / Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me
Fiction/Elektra/Rhino
1984/1985/1987/2
D+/A/A-
Reviewed by: Thomas Inskeep
Reviewed on: 2006-11-20



Posted 11/20/2006 - 01:09:54 PM by draglikepull:
 Despite the A- rating, I think Thomas is a bit harsh on Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. It's not quite the masterpiece that Disintegration is, but it's still an exceptional record. It could just be that I've always liked albums that show an impressive range (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness comes to mind as another great example), but I think the fact that the album covers so much ground is one of the best things about it.
 
Posted 11/20/2006 - 02:26:28 PM by boilingboy:
 Way to hard on The Top. No the best Cure album, certainly. But it was experimental and transitional; aand quitew a cut above what amost were doing at the time. Robert was attempting his first long-form melding of goth, new wave and pop; and it was quite a brave (if flawed) attempt. The title track, especially, is classic Cure: It's the sound of decay and emotional numbness. I don't think I've ever heard this particular feeling expressed in music so well. Future box sets should include this marvelous song.
 
Posted 11/20/2006 - 08:45:58 PM by terrorist:
 I remember playing The Top (the song) in my friends car once. He asked me to take it off because it was making him feel sick (we were parked in a gas station filling up at the time). The Top + Petrol Fumes = A Bad Trip. I think Dressing Up deserves a mention for its tripped out slowed down-sounding vocal. Bananafishbones is pretty likable and Give Me It is a fucken classic in the Shiver and Shake, Shake Dog Shake Kiss Me dark druggy Stoogey Cure vein. "My head is cold, my heart is cold, my heart is black, and stops every fucking night, I wait until it stops!!" fuck yeah. But no, true, its not an easy album to like I agree.
 
Posted 11/20/2006 - 10:12:18 PM by :
 When Lol Tolhurst was dropping stylistic drumroll flourishes all over 17 Seconds, Andy Anderson, slavering his denizen sceptical looseness for which he won a prize bongo in the Caterpillar Girl video, was always going to be inescapably google-searched and wikipedia-ised as a vigilante stump thumper per The Top`s live reincarnation in the 21st Century, which as you will have noted, will never actually happen. But I get time deconstructed inbetween decades wilfully as the there and here vs the now and then of the Cure`s mid 80s circilooplet of aniophrenic quangle asserts, and recuperate with the tinkle tones of a wooden koto, 2nd track in Head on the Door. But Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me`s rococo lips practically rent spittle from their songs` virtual triage of saxophonic bluster. A quorum would argue, the disintegrating attitude to which Icing Sugar demystifies the Smith/Dempsey interplay several years prior, has by now re-registered the Cure`s Olympian Doom Trilogy as psychotic pot smoking tropicalia. Sutures plucked, the strata rested on Wish/Wild Mood Swings/The Cure as a musier archetype to these three`s ontological Baudelairean ultrascape. (I hope).
 
Posted 11/21/2006 - 03:34:46 AM by :
 Though it flies in the face of all my non-existent music appreciation principles, I've always been more partial to bipolar downswing of Faith and the mid-habit-kicking serenade that is Pornography rather than the Victorian kiddie lit acid-scapes you'd think I'd sweat. I will qualify that by saying the video for the Caterpillar gave me delicious night terrors as a tot, a sort of harbinger. Again and again/Your body falls/The movement is sharp and clear and pure/And gone/I stop and kneel beside you/Drained of everything but pain Spleens et Ideals it ain't, no, but I've always thought of early Cure more as beholden to the syphilitic grandiosity of Des Esseintes. (next time you're at the gas station, play the Fourth World Eno)
 
Posted 11/21/2006 - 11:13:16 AM by :
 In a word, he could do no more than feel a trivial interest, a slight pity, for the people's flowers, fading under the poisonous breath of sewers and sinks in squalid districts; to make up, he loathed those that go with the cream and gold reception-rooms in new houses; he reserved, in fact, for the full and perfect delectation of his eyes, rare plants of high-bred type, coming from distant lands, kept alive by skill and pains in an artificial equatorial temperature maintained by carefully regulated furnaces.