The Cure: Faith - 1981
This was The Cure's third album and was the one upon which their "gloomy" reputation was built.
This begins with the sombre, resonant bass line and distant, echoey and dismal-sounding vocal of The Holy Hour. There was lots of bleak Joy Division influence on this but, despite that, it is full of dark atmosphere.
The livelier Primary lifts the initial gloom briefly but this is soon put to bed on the ghostly Other Voices. A more pleasing sound is to be found on the lengthier, pleasingly brooding All Cats Are Grey, where some (comparatively) attractive and melodic keyboard sounds merge most effectively with a gently rhythmic percussion.
The Funeral Party is suitably slow and funereal, with a Neu! style muffled sound to its keyboards and programmed drums. Doubt was a livelier track, but its upbeat tempo could not hide its very 1979-80 post punk vibe, driven along, as it was, by one of those instantly recognisable rubbery bass lines. Robert Smith's Rotten-esque sneering vocal sounded a bit hackneyed by now, too. The Drowning Man is classic post punk gloom as indeed is Faith. Nothing much really changes on this album. It has a strangely dignified feeling of beauty about it, though, and I quite like it, in a dark winter's afternoon sort of way.
It is a short album and one that inspired many a "goth" band subsequently but I (and many others) feel that its overbearing misery had been done to death, so to speak, by Joy Division. It was 1981, new romanticism and bright synth pop was the sound of the day. This sort of thing was fast becoming old hat and the Cure would remain, at this moment in time, in many ways a cult band, liked by a comparative minority of cognoscenti.
Changes were afoot, though, and The Cure went on to achieve a modicum of comparative non-cult popularity, however, as the eighties progressed. I have dipped into their output from this period. Remember that these are not reviews written by a die-hard Cure fan, but by someone who thought that he ought to explore their work from a somewhat neutral perspective. Therefore, they are not track-by-track assessments in the way that some of my other reviews are.
