The Cure – Wish (1992)
This week we have not one, but two reviews of The Cure’s Wish, the band’s most commercially succesful album which says on it’s back-cover: “the cure are anti-apartheid, all royalties from this album will be donated to amnesty international.”
***
“10, 9… 6, 5… 2, 1!” The fireworks exploded in the midnight sky, at different times in different locales, with different languages and different traditions; all uttered the same notion in one way or another – “HAPPY NEW YEAR!”. 1991 had come to close and the face of music was a different beast to what it was just three short years ago when The Cure were riding high on the success of their magnum opus, Disintegration (1989). That record, despite sounding far from the poppy Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987) , or the radio-friendly The Head On The Door (1985), went big – bigger than Robert Smith and his ever-changing gaggle of Goths probably could’ve ever imagined. The record went on to sell over 3 million copies worldwide and the disc itself, along with its singles, shot The Cure into chart positions they had never felt the pleasure of before.
There is a point to all this rambling – The Cure had a massive amount of pressure and expectation placed upon their tenuous, black-clad shoulders come the time Disintegration’s follow-up was due to be recorded. The group were left with the unenviable question of how to follow-up such a colossal album; whether to make a similar sounding record, or do something else – be that a return to a former phase of the band’s eclectic past, or trying something new.
The result was… well, neither really. It’s not another gothic album, nor is it the most poppy effort the boys did. It tends to lie somewhere in-between those two extremes, taking elements of nearly all The Cure’s phases and dabbing them here and there, making for a pretty eclectic mix. At times it does the melancholic, moody stuff, like the trudging “Apart”, and the gorgeous “Trust”; at other times it shoots for the poppy heights achieved by earlier, radio-friendly singles, and succeeds with the album’s unreserved, glistening gem, “Friday I’m In Love”; and to a lesser extent with the bizarrely funky “Wendy Time”.
But upon first hearing Wish, with the gloomy grandeur of Disintegration still in mind, the album feels a tad underwhelming. It’s frustrating, as one can’t really put a firm finger on exactly why one feels slightly unimpressed when spinning this record – it’s a very strong effort, after all, with touching, sentimental pieces like “A Letter To Elise”, with its lovely riff; the wonderful opening cut, called… er, “Open”; and of course, “Friday I’m In Love”, with its eloquently superb riff and quality lyrics and vocals from Smith – a catchy and concise Cure classic in every way. The aforementioned are just a few highlights, so it becomes increasingly irritating when one still struggles to place Wish in any concrete, hierarchical rank in The Cure’s discography.
But the answer to said frustrations is starkly simple and easy to understand. In fact, this writer has made several indirect references to exactly why Wish seems, upon its surface, inexplicably underwhelming. It essentially boils down to the fact that it was released when it was – the crucial detail being that it was the follow-up to one of the greatest alternative rock albums of the eighties, Disintegration. That album is an unbelievably difficult body of work to follow, and that’s precisely why Wish feels weaker at first glimpse.
With all that in mind, it becomes advisable that Wish is best approached without thought of Disintegration. If you hit play without any expectations or notions of what this record should be it really begins to shine, and show off of its strength – its consistency acting as flexing muscles, inspiring appreciation and awe in observers. If you don’t think of this as the follow-up to Disintegration and instead, just chalk it up as another Cure record (which it is, at the end of the day), then after several plays, Wish slowly but surely begins to mark itself out as a very enjoyable album – on a par with Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and trailing not too far behind The Head On The Door – two exceptional reasons to make sure this album finds its way into the sweaty palms of any Cure admirer who’s been putting the record off for far too long.
by Tom Cross
In the mid 80’s The Cure anticipated the 90’s shoegaze scene. At the same time, they also contributed to darkwave by building their style with the dreary world music ideas. Once Disintegration hit, they reached the peak of their popularity, expanding certain aspects of Kiss Me… while bringing back the gloom of Faith and Pornography to make their most hypnotic and darkly seductive soundscape of their career. So here we are in the 90’s. Wish is one of those albums that masques a dark interior with a sunny surface. Because of its great replay value, you find yourself reanalyzing the album in a way and you start to wonder how The Cure can mask these emotions as such.
Well, if you’ve heard Japanese Whispers or The Top, you should have already concluded Robert Smith is bipolar, or has a very eclectic snowglobe for a brain. This is one of the few albums were you could appropriately use the metaphor “a rollercoaster of emotions”. This being the first album of The Cure’s that mixes things up as such, there’s bound to be a few less than stellar tracks. The ones that come to mind are Wendy Time, Doing The Unstuck, and Cut. Wendy Time sounds like a funk version of Why Can’t I Be You and doesn’t really flow well at all with the songs it’s between. Doing The Unstuck doesn’t work because of place it’s at. After From The Edge… you get disappointed with Wendy Time, and then you hear Robert Smith singing “Let’s get happy!” and you’re like come on! The only problem with Cut is that it sounds like every other song on the record and doesn’t stand out whatsoever.
Noticeable missteps, as most of these songs are easily recognizable and branch out the classic Cure sound even more. High is a calming, upbeat song with the lower pitched lead sections they like to use, and even though it’s rather positive they manage to do it in such an enjoyably nostalgic way, using Smith’s word play to great effect. Speaking of positive, Friday I’m In Love is an old school sounding pop track and nothing more, albeit one of the best songs on here. Imagine if they wrote Push in the 60’s.
If you’re one of the sad Cure fellows, you too are in luck. Apart, Trust, and To Wish Impossible Things are just as brooding as anything on Disintegration. These songs, while troubled in their own rite, are made so much more personal due to Smith’s lyrics. He has an uncanny ability to throw a set of lyrics from his bag onto a new song the band wrote and have them go together so well. Ever since Seventeen Seconds, he’s been developing his format of telling stories with his lyrics. I put the emphasis of this theme on the songs Apart and From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea. Apart is literally the ultimate break up song, going through the slow motions of the inevitable breakdown of the relationship. Everything about this song was formulated to make you cry. From The Edge… sounds like it was constructed around the lyrics, as the music is pretty repetitive for its eight minutes.
And so we watch the sun come up
From the edge of the deep green sea
And she listens like her head’s on fire
Like she wants to believe in me
So I try, “Put your hands in the sky
Surrender, remember,
We’ll be here forever and we’ll never say goodbye… “
I’ve never been so colourfully-see-through-head before
I’ve never been so wonderfully-me-you-want-some-more
And all I want is to keep it like this
You and me alone, secret kiss
And don’t go home, don’t go away
Don’t let this end please stay…
Not just for today…
It goes on for a bit longer in the storyteller fashion, with the almost-shoegazey atmosphere the entire time, which might be why it works so well. To put it simply, there are no surprises throughout the album. This is just another solid Cure record, as they intended, and doesn’t trip up aside from the few mistakes I mentioned earlier. I don’t even have to mention how in tune the band sound with each other because they’ve sounded like this for most of their career. You’ve got your pop Cure, you’ve got your post-punk Cure, you’ve got your storyteller Cure, and you’ve got your gloomy Cure, so there’s literally something for everyone. This is also a great gateway record for people unfamiliar with the band, and a welcome addition to the discography. No fan of music should be disappointed here.
by Ferdinand Ihle