The Cure — Disintegration
Maybe there’s a time and a place for everything. Maybe the best way to experience the Cure’s Disintegration is as a teenager, between spells of Mumbai’s monsoon downpours. An overcast 4 pm sky seen through the windows of a bedroom whose bookshelves are brimming with copies of Problems in General Physics by I E Irodov, Principles of Physics by Resnick, Halliday, and Krane, and other foundational texts of science and engineering. Or maybe there’s a time and a place for mood pieces in particular. Pieces like Disintegration, an album that answers the question what do you get when you cross insecurity in the face of passing time with introspection and a general sense of malaise? These emotions that link a nearly-thirty Robert Smith writing Disintegration with the aim of creating a musical masterpiece before that landmark age, and a teenager experiencing the purgatory that is high school between spells of Mumbai’s torrential monsoon downpours.
What’s the anatomy of a mood piece? With Disintegration, it’s easy to explain. Unlike with most records I speak of here, with this album, the vocals come first. Robert Smith’s delivery is cat-like, nasal and often high-pitched, at times tentative (as on Lullaby), at times imploring (as on Fascination Street), but always seemingly at breaking point. This delivery confers earnestness upon the lyrics’ melancholia. Consequently, lines like if only I could fill my heart with love on Closedown, can't you see I try? / swimming the same deep water as you is hard on The Same Deep Water As You, and so it's all come back round to breaking apart again / breaking apart like I'm made up of glass again / making it up behind my back again / making it afraid for the fear of sleep again on the album’s pièce de résistance, its title track, don’t come across as posturing. For a mood piece like Disintegration, this sincere portrayal of emotions is central.
Is it possible to fake sincerity? Possibly. I can’t claim to guarantee that Smith was genuinely despondent when he wrote the majority of this album, and that the rest of the band readily joined in this creative vision because of internal strife driven by circumstances such as Lol Tolhurst’s alcoholism. However, I’d posit that this sort of monolithic despondency is hard to fake. And that for a mood piece to be truly successful in drawing you in, sincerity is essential.
The ‘sound’ comes next. Through most of the album, the band wallows in a gentle midtempo; Porl Thompson’s guitar does more repeating than noodling, Simon Gallup’s bass rumbles patterns that are reminiscent of early Joy Division, and Roger O’Donnell’s synths add an orchestral sparkle that has since become a staple of goth. In the backdrop, drones swell and wane and esoteric keys handled by Smith and Thompson crackle and pop for effect. The magic, however, is in how each of these parts is treated in production. By now, my love for reverb is likely obvious. After all, I keep talking about it. However, in the case of Disintegration in particular, reverb isn’t so much a feature as the heart of the sound. Every single stem on Disintegration is passed through a wash of reverb, with an added sprinkling of reverb in the final mix. In each track, guitar, vocal and synth tracks are passed through delay pedals, flangers, phasers, subjected to all sorts of treatment with the express purpose of making the final mix sound larger than life, all-encompassing. The end result is an exercise in studied maximalism, where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, both musically and lyrically.
Disintegration is 71 minutes long. No matter how well-produced and well-written an album is, it’d be nearly impossible to cope with 71 minutes of gloom. And the arrangement of this album acknowledges this. It isn’t all minor key: despite their lyrics, Plainsong, Pictures of You, and the vastly under-rated album closer, Untitled, are major key gems. However, the ultimate pressure release comes in the form of track 4 of the album, Lovesong, a straightforward pop song Smith wrote as a wedding present for his wife, Mary Poole. The album’s third single, it’s hooky chorus and sincere expression of affection ensured it resonated with a wide audience, and reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. In my opinion, its presence in Disintegration elevates it beyond just a successful mood piece, taking it to stratospheric heights, making it one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Which is why, although I’m no longer a teenager, and have just dealt with some version of Smith’s insecurities over the big three-oh, Disintegration still gives me goosebumps.
