The Cure: Faith (Deluxe Edition)

This weekend as I was driving around in the rain with a friend, I was playing "The Drowning Man" from the Cure's seminal 1981 release on the car stereo. My friend asked, "Which band is this?" When I told him it was the Cure, he said, "Oh. There have been so many new bands coming out that sound like the Cure, I wasn't sure whether it was one of them or the real thing."

Which is to say, this new series of double-disc reissues of the Cure's early albums, which started last fall with Three Imaginary Boys and continues tomorrow with Seventeen Seconds, Pornography, and Faith, could not come at a more auspicious time. Thanks to bands like Interpol and Bloc Party, which owe debts to Robert Smith's moody musical style and eccentric vocals respectively, the time is ripe for a rediscovery of the Cure's legacy. And this series of reissues is definitely the right way to do it.

The sound on this reissue is gorgeously clean. At this point in their history, the revolving Cure line-up was down to a core of three: Smith on vocals and lead, Simon Gallup on bass, and Laurence Tolhurst on drums, with keyboardist Matthieu Hartley abruptly leaving days before the recording session started. Slimmed down to the elemental basics, the band's playing is honed tight, with Gallup's big bass sound up front and Smith's guitars washing over the mix. (For better or worse, this is also the release where, perhaps to fill in some of the gaps in the mix, Smith started reverbing the hell out of his vocals.)

Some of the songs on this disc are stone-cold classics.

The major lyrical inspirations for the songs are said to be the death of "several friends and relations" and the terminal illness of Tolhurst's mother, and that combined with Smith's meditations on faith and disbelief provide the thematic core for the album.

Article Author: Timothy Jarrett

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