The early days of "gothic rock" Cure, from the 1980 "Seventeen Seconds" LP (still a favorite of mine). The whole album was recorded for something like 3000 GBP and the band worked 16-17 hours a day to finish it on budget.
One of the first times I can remember hearing flanger and phase applied to guitar (all of the guitarists I knew, me included, went out and bought these pedals immediately).
I just saw them in Mountain View on the last tour, what a magical night: https://magnetmagazine.com/2023/06/01/live-review-the-cure-mountain-view-ca-may-29-2023/
Apr 21, 2024
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A Problem With The Cure is that the production on albums like "Disintegration" can feel overbearingly reverb'd/synth'd-out to many contemporary ears, obscuring Robert Smith's pure pop-songwriting genius. Therefore their most accessible (and IMO best) album is this compilation of mostly-acoustic versions of their tunes, recorded in 2001 in London, originally included as the 2nd CD in the Japanese version of their Greatest Hits album but later reissued for (I think) Record Store Day in 2017. It's still hard to find in the streaming-verse so here are some youtube links:
The Cure - Complete A Side [ Acoustic Hits Picture LP ] (youtube.com)
The Cure - Complete B Side [ Acoustic Hits Picture LP ] (youtube.com)
The Cure - Complete C Side [ Acoustic Hits Picture LP ] (youtube.com)
The Cure ‎- Complete D Side [ Acoustic Hits Picture LP ] (youtube.com)
Apr 21, 2024
Way back on this day in 1977, a new CBGB-created template for guitar heroism was born.
Think you 🙏🏻 to the late Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd for showing us that not all guitar gods wear capes or “I’m working hard over here” faces.
Cool art is possible without bullshit macho posturing.
This song and album is ground zero for me.
Six-string midnight mass. 🕯️
“I remember how the darkness doubled.”
About as New York City an album as I can conjure.
Feb 9, 2024
A grotesque, unsettling musical picture of chaos, massacre and lunacy. There were some years since it was released (1980) where I couldn’t listen to it at all.
It's maybe the most unlikely opening track of an album I've ever heard (despite Ian Curtis' repeated chorus: "This is the way, step inside"). It's based upon a 1970 J.G. Ballard collection of short stories of the same name, which imagines a name-changing protagonist who creates surrealistic fantasies about celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and President Ronald Reagan.
One of the first times in recorded music (long before bands like R.E.M. made a regular practice of this) where I can recall band members swapping instruments; guitarist Bernard Sumner plays bass on the track, bassist Peter Hook "plays" guitar (it's basically one long, wobbly noise scribble).
Super disturbing. I'm always amazed that the band could even pull off a live performance of it. Impossibly influential; you can hear the outline of the Cure's "Pornography," the Swans' catalogue, and much of whatever became to be called "tribal" in the DNA of this track.
Sep 22, 2024
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Hey tyler hopefully this doesn’t violate some PI.FYI golden rule
But after nearly two years of writing, editing and arguing, my book about the EP is coming out in May and can be preordered here:
https://hozacrecords.com/product/aifl/
The book is about the origins, history and cultural impact of the EP since these little objects first started coming out in the 50s.
Over 50 of my music biz friends then helped me shape the list and review the top 200 ever released, according to us (ha).
For those of you who are into this kind of geekery/snobbery, I can’t wait to hear what you think. A labor of love, as all books are! ❤️
Mar 27, 2024
“Songs Of a Lost World” coming to a goth listening station near you Nov 1 🖤
The fr FW Me Friday the 13th the world was looking for
Sep 14, 2024
I will fail to explain just how much this band meant to me in the 90s.
So I will borrow from AV Club who did a fine job of distilling it:
“Unwound is the best band of the ’90s. Not just because of how prolific, consistent, and uncompromising it was, but because of how perfectly Unwound nested in a unique space between some of the most vital forms of music that decade: punk, post-rock, indie rock, post-hardcore, slow-core, and experimental noise. That jumble of subgenres doesn’t say much; in fact, it falls far short of what Unwound truly synthesized and stood for. Unwound stood for Unwound. But in a decade where most bands were either stridently earnest or stridently ironic, Unwound wasn’t stridently anything. It was only itself. In one sense Unwound was the quietest band of the ’90s, skulking around like a nerdy terror cell. In another sense it was the loudest, sculpting raw noise into contorted visions of inner turmoil and frustration.”
R.I.P. Vern Rumsey.
This is their finest song, from their finest album.
I really can’t say enough about the sheer bloody minded genius of this group. 🖤
Mar 23, 2024