The Cure - Wish

I’ve managed to have two arguments with myself this week in regards to my blog. One of which went something along the lines of this:

‘Come on now Lee. Let’s just put The Stone Roses to one side for a second while we-‘

‘No!’

‘Hey. Woah. Come on. You need to listen to a different album now for that blog thing that you’ve decided to commit to-‘

‘No!’

‘What… what do you mean no? You’re the one that decided to write this thing. We can’t just review ‘The Stone Roses’ again.’

‘Ooh! Maybe we could just review ‘The Sto-‘

‘We’re not going to review ‘The Stone Roses’ again! What about The Cure? Eh? Yeah? You like The Cure? Why don’t we try The Cure?’

‘Well... I do quite like The Cure I guess…’

‘Exactly! You love The Cure! Now, why don’t we go find a Cure album to listen to whil… No! Lee! LEE! Turn The Stone Roses off for one fucking second!!’

And so, eventually, after a self-inflicted Stone Roses ban and a brief mini tantrum, myself and I ventured onto Spotify to try and decide which Cure album we were going to review for this second blog, which then resulted in a slightly more sophisticated debate as to which Cure ‘era’ would be an appropriate place for us to start (I’m gonna switch back to first person now. The whole ‘two of me’ thing should’ve died ages ago…). With my knowledge thinly spread over their discography like a singles-esque pâté, I was aware of the fact that I could either find myself curled up in a foetal position on the floor crying to ‘Pictures Of You’, or tap dancing down the street and swinging off lampposts to ‘The Lovecats’, so in the end I decided that a safe place to begin would be the happy medium of upbeat-yet-deeply-depressing album, ‘Wish’.

After the first listen, I found myself hanging off a lamppost in the street crying my fucking eyes out. The album quite safely covers both bases, and although on first listen it seems to jump from one extreme to the other quite rapidly, a couple more plays revealed that the album does manage to lift you in and out of the darker moments in a more constructive way than it initially seems.

The opening track, aptly named ‘Open’, is a really strong start to the album. The song itself doesn’t really side with the ‘happier’ or ‘depressed’ elements which the rest of the album fluctuates between, but it comes in strong and allows the listener to enter the album quite comfortably without being hit too hard with any sort of Robert Smith depressiveness. ‘High’ follows the first track with a definitive Cure sounding guitar and ‘sparkle’ sounds that make you think maybe this album isn’t going to be quite as emotionally draining as you may have previously thought, before completely contradicting all of your foolish expectations with a hideously dark third track, ‘Apart’. I couldn’t quite decide if I liked this track or not. Not only for the reason that a part (genuinely not a pun) of it sounds like someone had hit the ‘Choir’ setting on a secondary school Casio keyboard, but because it just creates such a bleak atmosphere that it is genuinely quite a difficult song to listen to. A couple of tracks which feature later on in the album (I’m getting to them!! Bloody hell, be patient will you!) are similar in style, but ‘Apart’ feels as though it’s written literally just in order to depress the listener, and ends up leaving you wanting to skip it about 2.7 minutes in. Which, if you do, will lead you onto the slightly, slightly less downbeat song, ‘From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea’, which didn’t really strike me as anything overly spectacular, but was literally an O-K song.

HOWEVER, after a pretty average start to the album, Robert Smith and whichever other members were knocking around at this point start to kick it off with a sudden change in tone, bringing out the ‘funk’ in a ‘fabulous fabulous’ ‘Wendy Time’. Although the sound becomes much more upbeat, the lyrical content, of what I’ve interpreted to be about some riiiiiight ol’ manipulative cow, remain quite sinister and dark, giving the song a depth that is only really revealed after a few more listens.

‘Doing the Unstuck’ is the first of two tracks on the album that really manages to lift the mood, and does so with a powerfully optimistic feel, with Robert Smith reminding us that ‘it’s never too late to get up and go’. The song has a mysteriously ‘odd’ feel-good element to it that I can’t quite seem to put my finger on, but already I can feel this becoming a bit of a personal favourite from the band’s back catalogue, so ‘let’s get happy’, and move onto Cure classic ‘Friday I’m in Love’ - the second of the two ‘happier’ tracks. I’ve never really worked out what this song means, so I’m going to look it up now… Ah. In the words of Robert Smith, it’s literally just a ‘dumb pop song’ they wrote about looking forward to weekly Friday dates with a girl. Aw. That’s actually quite nice innit? What a lovely song…

Right. Now. HERE is where the album decides to take another sudden turn. One minute you’re carelessly singing along about being in love on a Friday, and then BAM! The Casio keyboard is cracked out again for the darker track ‘Trust’. Hoooooowever, I actually really liked this song. The way Robert Smith sings on this track feels much more personal than ‘Apart’, and lyrically is something I think heart-broken listeners will really be able to relate to. Although thrust upon the listener quite suddenly, this song has a really strong impact after you manage to settle into it.

My first encounter of ‘A Letter to Elise’ was a distorted, faster Blink-182 cover I’d heard them do on an MTV Icon show for The Cure years before I’d even realised who these crazy haired bastards were. But, obviously having listened to the original since, it’s a song that I’ve grown to really like over the years. It’s such a lovely song to listen to, and is by far one of The Cure’s greatest singles, which fits really well into this album.

The guitar feedback we hear at the start of ‘Cut’ leads into a slightly out of place, almost punk-rocky song. A sound which I’ve not heard used in any other Cure track before, but one which seemed to work really well. Again, this song contains intense lyrical content which could quite easily be overlooked when hearing for the first few times.

And, as expected, we knew we weren’t going to just breeze through without one more downhearted song slotted in towards the end of the album. ‘To Wish Impossible Things’, assumedly a track for which the album gains its title from, is a touching song mourning the end of a once hopeful relationship, which fits in quite nicely before the final track, ‘End’. This last song finishes the album with a heavier, slightly distorted guitar that bears resemblance to an almost Placebo-y kind of sound. Robert Smith’s continuous requests to ‘please stop loving’ him wrap the album up rather neatly with the juxtapositionary feel which the album successfully carries throughout, leaving us not quite necessarily on a high, but nor, thankfully, on too much of a low.

To be totally honest, I wasn’t overly keen on this album on first listen. But after allowing myself to adapt to the frequent emotional adjustments, it really did grow on me. Although the start of the album seems slightly weaker, not necessarily in content, but in ‘feel’ (there’s surely a better word to use than that… let me Shift+F7 it…). Although the start of the album seems slightly weaker, not necessarily in content, but in its ‘ambience’, the rest of the album evokes some strong emotions which Robert Smith has always managed to exploit rather well. The union of hopelessness in tracks such as ‘Trust’ and a seemingly underlying hopefulness in ‘Doing the Unstuck’ gives the album a variety and edge that I don’t really think many other artists other than The Cure are able to provide.

Immediate stand out tracks:

Doing the Unstuck; A Letter to Elise; Friday I’m In Love; Wendy Time; End

Link to album:

http://open.spotify.com/user/spillee86/playlist/5ofa4UReNHwADju1gY23