FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
The Cure – Disintegration
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FOR this round of Vinyl Corner…
I am featuring a band that I have not covered much through the years. I can take or leave some of The Cure’s albums, but I acknowledge how important Disintegration is. Their eighth studio album, it was released on 2nd May, 1989 by Fiction Records. The album marked a return to the band’s more introspective Gothic Rock style the band had laid down in the early-1980s. I think Robert Smith, the band’s leader, was looking to deliver an album that was more effecting, deep and important. Smith was also experimenting more with hallucinogenic drugs during the making of Disintegration (in part due to The Cure’s burgeoning commercial success) – this had a strong influence on the production and sound of the album. I would advise people to buy the album on vinyl, as it is a terrific work that deserves to be heard by everyone. Although it can be a heavy listen, there is a lot to love and cherish. Smith was very depressed prior to the recording of Disintegration, knowing that he would be thirty in a year. He was of the opinion that masterpieces in Rock had been completed well before the band members reached such an age. Whilst Lovesong, Pictures of You, and Lullaby are more accessible songs, there are tracks on Disintegration that are a bit heavier and take longer to reveal themselves. That is what I like about Disintegration: it fuses these songs that instantly hook you; there are others which grow and bloom the more you listen to them.
Even though Smith felt the band had become stadium rock and sort of sold out when Disintegration was released, the album is often viewed as one of the best ever. It frequently appears on polls of the greatest albums of all-time. I will bring in a fairly recent interview with Robert Smith – he spoke with Rolling Stone in 2019 on the thirtieth anniversary of Disintegration. I want to introduce a couple of reviews for the album; just to show you what critics make of The Cure’s masterpiece. This is what AllMusic noted in their review:
“Expanding the latent arena rock sensibilities that peppered Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by slowing them down and stretching them to the breaking point, the Cure reached the peak of their popularity with the crawling, darkly seductive Disintegration. It's a hypnotic, mesmerizing record, comprised almost entirely of epics like the soaring, icy "Pictures of You." The handful of pop songs, like the concise and utterly charming "Love Song," don't alleviate the doom-laden atmosphere. The Cure's gloomy soundscapes have rarely sounded so alluring, however, and the songs -- from the pulsating, ominous "Fascination Street" to the eerie, string-laced "Lullaby" -- have rarely been so well-constructed and memorable. It's fitting that Disintegration was their commercial breakthrough, since, in many ways, the album is the culmination of all the musical directions the Cure were pursuing over the course of the '80s”.
The more one listens to Disintegration, the bigger the effect it has. It is a magnificent album and one, thirty-two years after its release, still makes an impression on me! I want to introduce a portion of Pitchfork’s review:
“It’s no wonder this was meaningful to a lot of teenagers: The sheer emotional grandeur of tracks like that opener, “Plainsong,” make a great match for the feeling that everything in your life is all-consumingly important, whether it’s your all-consuming sadness, joy, longing, or whatever. And yet Disintegration is not a very teenagey album. It’s not an emo whine, and it’s not a big miserablist mope, either; one of its most popular tracks, “Lovesong,” was written by Smith as a wedding present for his wife. “I will always love you,” it keeps promising—not the way you sing that in a giddy love song, but like it’s a grave, solemn, bloody commitment. It was a top 10 hit in the U.S.
This is the thing: The album has a reputation as some huge, dark, crushingly depressive experience. It’s not entirely unearned. If you want to be crushingly depressed with Disintegration, or frustrated, or self-loathing, it’ll embrace you right back. But it’ll embrace other things, too. A whole lot of this album’s appeal is that it’s comforting, practically womblike—big, warm, slow, full of beauty and melody and even joy. The trick, I think, is how well it serves as a soundtrack to that feeling that everything around you is meaningful, whether it’s beautiful or horrible or sublime: This is an album for capital-R Romantics, not sulkers. It’s muscular (like on the title track), wistful (“Pictures of You”), ghostly (“Closedown”), seething (“Fascination Street”), and yeah, morose, but what’s striking is how each of those qualities can reach really, really far into your gut. It’s not a record for the dead-inside: Get far enough into this album, and I will almost guarantee you will feel some shit”.
I think that Disintegration has grown and matured through the years, in the sense that it seems to reveal more and it sounds even more brilliant now. That may strange but, years after I first heard the album, and it does stun and move me. Robert Smith discussed the thirtieth anniversary of Disintegration with Rolling Stone:
“This year marks the 30th anniversary of Disintegration. You recently played the full album in Australia. What strikes you about those songs now?
It’s probably one of two or three albums that meant something in the broader cultural sense than just, like, “another Cure album.” It happened at a particular time, and I suppose it had the right combination of songs and it meant a lot to a lot of people. I actually wanted to do the 40th anniversary of Three Imaginary Boys instead, but I was overruled, so we did Disintegration, which is probably the wise thing to do.
When was the last time you sat down with the record?
I think when I did the remaster for Disintegration in 2010 was the first time I’d listened to the album since we’d made it. At that point I thought, “Yeah, I get now why people were drawn into it.” It’s a really nice balance of big and small in a funny way. It manages to hang together in a way that on paper it really shouldn’t. And when we played it through earlier this year, when we were rehearsing it, I kind of felt that again. I sort of remembered. I thought, “Yeah, it’s actually really cleverly put together. I kind of knew what I was doing briefly”.
Since you’re writing a new album now, did you get a new perspective on Disintegration?
At the same time we were rehearsing Disintegration, we were running through songs for the new album that we’re recording this year. I think that helped the band. It’s certainly helped me light the way. While I think [Disintegration] is a great album, and I’m never going to think, “If only I’d done this, if only I could have done that,” because that would be foolish, it helped me to see how it was constructed. So it wasn’t done in a purposeful way, but I had an overview of the whole thing in my head before we played the first note I knew how I wanted it to start and I knew what I wanted it to feel like by the time we ended. That informed the recording of the new album. So for that reason, it was a good thing to do”.
Go and buy Disintegration on vinyl, as it is a magnificent record and, debatably, the finest The Cure have ever put out. Even though Disintegration arrived at the end of the 1980s, there is no doubt that it is…
ONE of the best of the decade.