Pornography: the seminal Cure album (Cure, The in general)

Member Name: Jay Pendragon

Product:	Cure, The in general
Date:	25/10/00 (29 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: tribal beats, schitzophrentic rantings, watery post-nocturnal Cure guitar

Disadvantages: you may get so depressed you stay in bed for a week

There are two types of Cure fans- there are the happy-go-lucky casual listeners who dance to the tragic mockery and naggingly catchy, but sometimes insanely ludicrous(and lucrative) pop songs Smith tends to come up with after hitting the crack pipe such as 'Friday, I'm in Love', 'In Between Days' or 'the Lovecats'- then there are the people like me... The clad-in-black kids walking around doomy with Robert Smith's kisser smack-dab on a t-shirt moaning about how 'Wild Mood Swings' was a farce or how 'Blood Flowers' lacks the passion and existential philosophical ideas of past records. Well, if you're the latter, you already know about how f***in' excellent 'Pornography' is. If you don't and prefer stuff like 'Facination Street' to 'Catapillar', then you will really enjoy Pornography. To describe 'Pornography' is to describe a stormy drab night under a tree while thunder crackles and all of a sudden a disturbing howl emits from the local loony asylum and chills you to the bone. 'Pornography' is the sound of a band falling apart by the second, of Smith's sanity slipping away and like getting smashed in the face with a steel-toe boot. Produced around '82 by Phil Thornally( later, bass player for the 83-84 period), the record is the darkest territory the band has ever ventured into, before or since. It makes the recent 'Blood Flowers' sound like lolli-pops and rainbows in the sky- its also Fat boy Smith's most responsible homage to 'Closer'era Joy Division. It kicks off with the dark, desolate danse of '100 Years', which is like grinding metal. It slips into the watery hopelessness of 'a Short Term Effect', and the tribal rhythms which would later be echoed in the music of bands such as Bauhaus and early Sisters of Mercy never stop until the title track fades into incoherant rantings from a man clearly on the brink of a nervous b
reak-down. The lyrical content is Dylan Thomas at his most eccentrically frightening meets Sylvia Plath circa 'Ariel'. Lol Tulhurst's drumming reached it's peak around this time, prompting him to switch to... Heh... Keyboards- or woodblock, as I like to call it. Songs such as the horribly wonderful 'Siamese Twins' balance out the driving force of such tracks as 'Hanging Garden' and the gloriously punishing 'Figurehead'. Definitely recommended for the gloom-monger which resides in all of us.

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