TripWire

This has been leaked and I gave it a listen. I can tell it's definately produced by Ross Robinson, it's basically a straight guitar album, can't remember even hearing a synth line on it. My first impressions are that I like it, it doesn't blow me away or anything but has the potential to grow on me. I think the opener "Lost" is the best building from a simple guitar riff to a loud angryish Robert Smith vocal climax. Most of his vocals are upfront and dry, compared to previous Cure albums. There's not a great slow ballad or anything like that...but one song has him saying stuff like "get the fu$k out of my head'...it seems like an angry album. I'm definately buying it this tuesday, give it a listen if you can.

Jepthah

Robert Smith, yet again (paraphrased): "Best thing we've ever done."



We'll see, Bob.

Chrisedge

I've listened to it twice this morning, pretty decent. I got tix to the show in So Cal. so I wanted to get primed.

My wife will be picking it up tues.

TripWire

there's also a bonus edition of this cd with a making of 30 minute DVD. should be pretty interesting.

Hollowgen

when can i pick up the remastered Disintegration?

sergtv

can't wait to get it.. been a cure fan for a long time now.. just bought the trilogy disk and i'm watching it right now.. i even like the song robert smith did with blink.. they are coming to town on august 24th tickets go on sale on july tenth.. can't wait!!!!!!!

DJLinus

Seems all the major places (Best Buy, Circuit City, Target) are selling the regular edition for $9.99 this week. In Target's ad, it lists the bonus edition as being $12.99. Just a heads-up if anyone feels the need to price match (BB and CC are $15.99 and $19.99 respectively).

joefrog91

I pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition from Tower Records to get the 3 button set and also the Japanese version with 14 tracks. The vinyl has all 15 tracks, but I don't have a record player. I've been out of town, so UPS left a note on my door saying the Japanese version will be redelivered tomorrow.

I've been listening to the stream on VH-1.com though and like the new songs. My favorite right now is Before 3 with The Promise coming in a close second. I can't wait to get the single for The End Of The World so I can get the 15th track. I haven't watched the bonus DVD yet.

whynotsmile

i like it a lot. its really heavy. robert sounds great. he really seems motivated by something. favorite song is END OF THE WORLD.

the only cd of theirs i had was greatest hits and the b sides. im waiting to buy the other albums for when they are remastered. hope they are all as great as this. its different though. sounds like a real rock record. no keyboards. heavy guitar. im glad the limp bizkit producer pulled it off.

whynotsmile

just a heads up though, i heard robert on the radio here in LA. he mentioned how japan was getting 3 extra songs. the dj was pretty pissed and suprised, and robert said it really bugged him too, but he didn't want to fight with the label about it. he did assure his US fans that those songs will DEFFINITLY be available in the upcoming future

whynotsmile

one more heads up:

DONT spend the extra cash for the dvd version. shit, really it is. its barely 20 minutes long. all it is is a camcorder in the studio with the cure. but theres no sound. so 2 instrumental tracks and one cure song is looped over the footage. the footage is just boring....wow...the guy is playing drums...for 5 minutes. fantastic. i wonder what song he is playing.

really just a waste of time and money. i watched it for about 3 minutes before i started flipping to the ashlee simpson show

cdollaz

It really picks up and gets good about Track 5. I think tracks 1, 3, and 4 are pretty weak. The single (End Of The World) is horrible. Track 2 would be very good if it wasn't for the vocal effects. Then it gets to #5 and the type of songs I expect from this band start to kick in. Great from there on.

jonnyrocks

I'll second that (except I'd replace "flipping to the ashlee simpson show" with simply "falling asleep, crying"). First an over-priced bonus DVD from Morrissey, now this one...I used to think these incentives were cool...

Josh-da-man

Just a heads up, but it looks like Deepdiscountcd.com has the DVD edition of "The Cure" for $9.89.

Here's the text from the search page:

(Oddly enough, in the descriptions, it says that both are 1 disc)

Unless this is a misprint, it looks like they're selling the edition with the DVD for LESS than the standard edition. I don't know how long this will last, so anyone interested in this deal should probably move on it quickly.

whynotsmile

hahaha the record company should pay YOU money for watching the dvd

isamu

I'll be picking it up next week.

Anyone else read this article. It's pretty good. Who the hell is Laura Sinatra anyway? Any relation to Frank? :P

++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Cure Returns to Face Its Progeny
By LAURA SINAGRA

Published: June 27, 2004


FOR nearly 30 years, Robert Smith of the British rock band the Cure has been identified with his spidery hairdo, his heavy eyeliner and lipstick, and his yelp. That stifled sob gives Mr. Smith's lyrics an enviable urgency, whether as a sigh of ecstasy or an anguished lament. Throughout the 80's the Cure built a cult following with bouncy MTV hits like "Let's Go to Bed" and the prom-night smash "Just Like Heaven" as well as dark albums of goth drone like "Pornography" and "Disintegration."

But despite Mr. Smith's punchy guitar patterns, pleading melodies and melancholy grandeur, he was considered a dreamy lightweight compared to serious-minded contemporaries like Michael Stipe of R.E.M and Bono of U2. And though Mr. Smith remained a black-clad pied piper of adolescent depressives around the world, no one had him figured as a major rock influence. But now, Mr. Smith's yelp is everywhere.

Neo-80's bands like New York's Interpol and the Rapture (whose Luke Jenner is the most pronounced yelper of the lot) write darkly reflective songs that hark back to the Cure's early albums, weaving sharp guitar or keyboards over anxious, danceable beats. But the emo-folk singer Conor Oberst, of Bright Eyes, owes a debt as well — his own yelp approximates Mr. Smith's public displays of heartache. And even bands that don't yelp at all, from the arty hard-rockers the Deftones to the pop-punkers Blink-182 (who featured Mr. Smith on its last record), credit Mr. Smith for giving them license to express feelings of vulnerability that might be frowned upon in their own genres.

The Cure will release its impressive, self-titled new album (I Am/Geffen) on Tuesday. The video for the first single, "The End of the World," is playing on MTV. And later this summer, the band will headline its own Curiosa tour, with help from its younger progeny the Rapture, Interpol, Cursive, Mogwai and Thursday. The question arises: how did Robert Smith, this sobbing wraith, become the godfather of woe?

In the 80's, the Cure wooed arty fans who wore a vaguely defined sadness as a badge of significance. While his mopey British rival Morrissey attracted a snide intellectual set with complaints about class and sexual politics in a conservative society, Mr. Smith offered self-pitying lyrics like these from "Homesick": "Oh it was sweet, it was wild, and oh how I trembled stuck in honey/ honey, cling to me so just one more, just one more go inspire in me the desire in me to never go home." With his yelp lending petulance to the entreaty of "In Between Days" or futility to the crumpled gratitude of "Lovesong," Mr. Smith's over-the-top-displays of vulnerability turned navel-gazing self-pity into a kind of liberation. And lonely brooders found community within the band's growing cult. Detractors criticized Mr. Smith's preoccupation with duplicitous fairies and hanging gardens as absurd, a kind of campy catharsis, but the young fans gladly identified with his "me's" and "you's."

This epic self-involvement is something the emo rockers have inherited. In the sense that emo "privileges private drama," as Andy Greenwald writes in his recent book, "Nothing Feels Good," Mr. Smith is a forefather of the genre. On Web sites where teenage emo fans congregate, like livejournal.com (and the decidedly more goth deadjournal.com), the Cure is often listed in the company of newer bands like Thursday and Bright Eyes.

What these bands share with the Cure is a willingness to make personal weakness central to their aesthetic. But where Mr. Smith cloaks his intimate feelings in romantic symbols like angels and spiders, the others ground theirs in details drawn from their own lives: the circumstances of a friend's nervous breakdown or a death in a car crash.

Though his music often suggests a constant state of collapse, Mr. Smith, 45, is hardly an emotional wreck. Drugs influenced his darkest 80's records, but his life is no "Behind the Music" cautionary tale. He lives in suburban London, has been married for years to his high school sweetheart and takes an active hand in the management of his business affairs.

Mr. Smith has said that his musical idols are Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie, a pairing that provides a clue to the balance he strikes between sad-clown artifice and authentic catharsis. Where Mr. Bowie has freely moved between personas, Mr. Smith has chosen his own lipsticked character to express that part of himself that is crippled with doubt, wracked by lust, fear and regret.

It's easy to see how Mr. Smith's theatricality would be more appealing to today's young bands than the macho posturing of grunge and rap metal they grew up with. Mr. Smith's makeup recalls the playful visual experimentation that characterized much of early 80's pop culture. New bands like the the Faint, Interpol and Hot Hot Heat pick up on Mr. Smith's more stylized transgressions. They adopt 80's sounds and, to a lesser extent, looks in a quest for what they imagine was a heyday for artistic expression. For bands that don't write confessional lyrics, the imitation of Mr. Smith's yelp can simply be a way to convey urgency, even if its just an urgent need for bodies on the dance floor.

The Cure's previous album, "Bloodflowers," from 2000, was supposed to be the band's swan song. After its release, Mr. Smith left his longtime label, Fiction/Elektra, and pondered a solo career. It was Ross Robinson, the producer of bands like Limp Bizkit and Slipknot and a Cure fan, who convinced Mr. Smith that he should capitalize on this groundswell of young imitators. Mr. Robinson urged the band to record together live, which Mr. Smith had not done with any of his band's many lineups since his first album. The approach, while not compromising the sound of the Cure, resulted in stretches that recall the aggression of Mr. Robinson's harder-edged clients.

"The Cure" begins, though, with "Lost," a song the emo crowd would appreciate. Backing himself with spare guitar strumming, Mr. Smith admits, "I can't find myself." The song swirls into a rabbit-hole of doubt. Similarly, the midtempo "The End of the World" finds Mr. Smith singing, "I can't remember how to be all you wanted," before he crashes into a chorus of "I couldn't ever love you more." The exuberant chords of "Before Three" contrast with the more doomy, metal-sounding "Labyrinth," which makes a horror movie out of aging, lamenting the changing face of a familiar companion: "It's not the same you/ It never really is."

In the album's final song, "The Promise," Mr. Smith yelps recriminations to a loved one long gone, showing goth fans he hasn't strayed from a preoccupation with death. Of course, what "The Cure" really demonstrates is death's opposite. As he releases the new album and takes the stage with young admirers, Mr. Smith has succeeded in making overblown sadness a key to survival.


Laura Sinagra reviews pop music and film for The Village Voice, Spin and Rolling Stone.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Nearly all of the bands she mentioned I've never heard of, except of course Bowie, Hendrix and Moz. I enjoyed that article...but my question is, are the newer, younger bands she refers to any good? Who would receommend from that article?