The Cure are, as a rule, quite minimalist, and this one seems to take a cue from the likes of Eno, Joy Division, and Bowie’s Berlin period. The tracks have a beat, they have phrases on guitar or keyboard, but they are built such that these elements continue unchanged, like krautrock. There isn’t much in the way of key changes, verse/chorus structure, or anything like that. Each track is around 4 minutes of ongoing music that could, had they wished, have gone on for ten, twenty minutes. Smith replaced his bassist with Simon Gallup because Gallup was more willing to play simplicity. Although the instrumentation is analogue, so methodical is it at times that you’d think that a drum machine was being used.
The mix, too, has a ghostly quality to it. Smith’s vocals are faint, like he’s calling from the room next door, or perhaps from beyond the veil of death. The minimalism is strongest in tracks like A Reflection, and Three. In Play For Today, the guitar phrases come to the fore. In Your House is creeping and sinister, At Night has fuzzy distortion and deep, bassy, keyboards (like the old Moog bass). Something about the tonal palate of the songs made me think of a forest in winter – stark black trees against formless white, maybe a trace of red blood in the snow.
This didn’t grab me the same way that Disintegration did when I first heard it – if that’s on the list (I’d be surprised if it wasn’t, if this one is) it’ll be interesting to see if my opinion changes. It’s probably an album to spend more time appreciating.
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