The Cure: Seventeen Seconds - 1980
Never mind post punk, this, The Cure’s second album, has been viewed retrospectively as the first gothic rock album. A sub-genre was born.
Having been playing guitar with Siouxsie & The Banshees, Robert Smith came back wanting to deliver a sound similar to that of Steve Severin and Budgie. He managed it too, serving up a supremely dark yet strangely classy album. It was also supremely influential, on bands like The Stranglers, contemporaries Joy Division and Echo & The Bunnymen and, in reverse, on The Banshees. It is a short album - which given its sombre soundscapes is possibly not a bad thing - and it is one that I have to say that I really like. It has a great sound quality to it and bags of atmosphere. It has to be regarded as one of the great, if not slightly overlooked, early eighties albums.
After an ambient, atmospheric instrumental opener in A Reflection, Play For Today is wonderful in its melodic bleakness, featuring a lovely deep bass sound. Indeed, the same can be said of both the subtly attractive Secrets and In Your House.
There is a mature competence and depth to this material that contrasts markedly with the often punky-post punky edginess of their debut album. Tracks like the sombrely grandiose Three and the new romantic-style synth-driven and spacey A Forest both display a very Joy Division noir ambience to them. The latter is a beautifully atmospheric track.
I can come up with similar descriptions for M and the magnificent and moody At Night. Smith’s voice is mournful and detached on the latter - this man, just as much as Ian Curtis, was a true master of misery. Seventeen Seconds, of course, didn’t lift the gloomy feel at all, and it would been strange if it had. The album ends as morosely as it began. This is an album for the dark depths of winter. As with the previous album, I really wish I had got into this back in 1980, but there was so much other music around that took up my attention. I am enjoying getting into it now, all these years later.
