Supervert Picks
A decade or so ago, if you were playing a little S&M game with your girlfriend, you might have bound her wrists with her own brassiere, nailed the brassiere to the wall behind the bed, and then, once you had her in this posture of submission, you might have — if you were really cruel — you might have put headphones on her and forced her to listen to a Cure album. That's how un-cool the Cure were for a while. To say you were a fan was as embarrassing as admitting to a venereal infection, and to force someone else to listen to them was just plain sadistic. Crede experto, as the saying goes in Latin — believe somebody who's played that little S&M game. But suddenly the Cure are the hippest thing again. Frontman Robert Smith began the Cure's rehabilitation with an appearance on South Park a few years ago, and now artists such as Tricky are doing covers and Blank & Jones are doing remixes of classic Cure songs. Collaborators such as Junkie XL, Junior Jack, and Blink 182 are inviting Robert Smith to do guest vocals on their latest CDs. And cool Brooklyn bands are citing the Cure as the influence. To consummate this renewed popularity, the Cure have embarked on a series of very special releases. First of these was 2003's Trilogy, a DVD capturing a fabulous Berlin concert in which the Cure daringly played three of their heaviest albums — Pornography, Disintegration, and Bloodflowers — in a single live performance. This month a four-disk collection of b-sides and rarities called Join the Dots is hitting the streets, and later in the year the band will be releasing a new album and remasters of their entire catalogue. Join the Dots is an exceptional box set. On first sight you are struck by the elegant packaging, which is expensively printed and made to look like a nice hardcover book rather than a CD. And in fact there is a book inside, a long text explaining all the various b-sides and what they mean to the band. But all of that is icing on the cake, because really it is the music that counts — and with the Cure more than with any band, the music that makes up these b-sides is hardly the typical slag or scrap that failed to make it onto an album. Robert Smith has explained how, as a young man, he always preferred the b-sides of his favorite bands to the a-sides, and accordingly he has always lavished a care on them that distinguishes them from the throwaways that make up other bands' b-sides. Far from being the mediocre tracks that couldn't make it onto the album, Cure b-sides often leave you thinking that these were the tracks that should have been on the album. This is especially true, for example, of the b-sides for 1996's Wild Mood Swings. Though this album showed an astonishing range (hence its title) and innovative songwriting, there was something un-Cure-like about it that made it unpopular with the group's usual adherents. Its b-sides, however, are among the best songs ever written by Robert Smith. "It Used to Be Me," with its heavily flanged guitar and passionately introspective vocals, is probably the best track to emerge from the Wild Mood Swings recording sessions, and yet it was released as a b-side. How many other bands are confident enough of their material that they can afford to put out some of their greatest music in formats that only hardcore fans will ever hear? Every song was remastered for this box set, which doesn't mean very much for the most recent releases. But when you hear the crystalline sound imparted to songs that were formerly only available on vinyl or tape, it can be like hearing the song — really hearing it — for the first time. You can hear the pick against the guitar strings in 1979's "I'm Cold." The whispering in 1984's "Happy the Man" accquires an almost creepy intimacy, like a ghost murmuring into your ear. And 1985's growly "New Day," a dark song recorded a few hours before Robert Smith suffered some kind of nervous breakdown, becomes a veritable landscape of sound and incident. It makes you think of getting lost in a forest at night, hearing drumming and howling coming from locations you cannot pinpoint in the dark, so that it seems like it's all around you — or perhaps it's inside of you, your own voice echoing in your head, screaming "New Day" because you can't wait for light to break. That's what it makes you imagine, at least until you remember how another girl — the one who had a contest with her friends to see who could sleep with a guy in the weirdest spot and then won when she did it in the back of a hearse — had turned you on to the Cure with this very song. And then you think that maybe that other girl, the one who came a few years later, might not have needed to be tied up to listen to the Cure if only you'd played a few of these fabulous b-sides instead of an album. Email this page to a friendTell someone about Supervert Picks - The Cure, Join the Dots at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not recorded or used in any way.) Your name
Your email
Friend's email
Your message
Other Supervert Sites
© 2008 Supervert 32C Inc. All Rights Reserved. » Sitemap
|
The Cure, 
Necrophilia Variations
|
Necrophilia Variations is Supervert's new book about death, desire, and deviance. Read sample chapters of this literary monograph on the erotic attraction to corpses or order your copy now! |
Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish
|
Reviewers are raving about Supervert's book Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, calling it "brilliant," "seductively nasty," and "one of the most astonishing books to come out in years." |
Horror Panegyric
|
Horror Panegyric is a limited edition hardcover including Supervert's essay on the notorious Lord Horror novels of Savoy Books, as well as excerpts from the hard-to-find novels. |
Electronic Library
Essays |
Shockwave |
Necro Enema Amalgamated
Surveys
Looking for Porn?
Supervert does not make porn but the pervy nature of its work leads people to look for it here. So if you want babes or whatever, this is good porn.