The Cure Head on The Door

After recording one of their darkest albums, 1984's The Top, the Cure regrouped and shuffled their lineup, which changed their musical direction rather radically. While the band always had a pop element in their sound and even recorded one of the lightest songs of the '80s, "The Lovecats," The Head on the Door is where they become a hitmaking machine. The shiny, sleek production and laser-sharp melodies of "Inbetween Days" and "Close to Me" helped them become modern rock radio staples and the inspired videos had them in heavy rotation on MTV. The rest of the record didn't suffer for hooks and inventive arrangements either, making even the gloomiest songs like "Screw" and "Kyoto Song" sound radio-ready, and the inventive arrangements…

Recorded in the midst of Robert Smith's tenuous tenure with Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Top is arguably the most hedonistic record the Cure ever produced. Essentially Smith and Lol Tolhurst working with studio musicians (this being the period when the Cure's lineup was never assured), it's an album obviously recorded under stress, drink, and drugs. More wildly experimental musically than anything before it, it laid the foundations for the Cure's pattern of unpigeonholable albums that were to erase their reputation built by Pornography and eventually culminating in Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. That said, it's still very much a Cure record. Heavy on the percussion and quaint keyboard effects that were so big in the '80s, the melodies ("The Caterpillar," "Shake Dog Shake") are unmistakably Robert Smith…

Priming the pump for their new 2008 studio album, the Cure invite five of their modern-day disciples to remix the first round of singles from their forthcoming 4:13 Dream - all released during the summer of 2008 - for theHypnagogic States EP. All the acts here - Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy, Jared Leto of 30 Seconds to Mars, Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, Jade Puget of AFI and Cure opener 65 Days of Static - do demonstrate some clear debt to the Cure, which manifests not in a doomy, sultry fashion but oddly, in mixes that are somewhat reminiscent of early-'90s Cure B-sides - an appropriate enough sound given the ages of the musicians, but not quite the classic Cure that provides their inspiration (although to be honest, apart from parts of MCR and AFI, none of these bands really sounds that much like the Cure, they just like Robert Smith's makeup)…

It's ironic that the Cure, a band whose albums have always seemed like definitive artistic statements, were at their best as a singles band. On the group's singles, Robert Smith's ideas reached their full potential, since they captured not only the group's off-kilter pop sense, but also the haunting melancholy and wacky humor that interlaced Smith's songs. Galore rounds up the singles from the second part of the Cure's career, beginning with "Why Can't I Be You?" from 1987's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and ending with "Gone!" from 1996's Wild Mood Swings. Between those two are 15 more songs, nearly every one of which is a gem. The Cure were never a repetitive singles band, and there's a dizzying array of styles here, from infectious jangle pop ("Friday I'm in Love," "Mint Car") and monolithic, chilly goth rock ("Fascination Street," "Pictures of You," "Just Like Heaven")…

An assortment of remixes, re-recordings, old singles, and one new song ("Never Enough"). Most of the remixes are quite radical, leaving only the bare bones of the original song. There are enough oddities and rare tracks on Mixed Up to make it necessary for Cure fans, but it's too specialized for casual listeners.

This one-off collaboration between the Cure's Robert Smith and Siouxsie & the Banshees' Steven Severin resulted in an eccentric, and at times incompatible, mix of psychedelic sounds wrapped around alternative '80s pop. Writers Smith and Severin's more eccentric tendencies are as likely to evoke pictures of a carnival as a funereal march, but the backbone rests largely on tightly constructed tunes with occasional forays into the experimental. Jeanette Landray sings the majority of the tracks, while Smith takes the lead twice amongst a smattering of instrumentals. Standout tracks include the Middle Eastern-twinged "Orgy" and the more conventional "Mouth to Mouth." Smith's distinctive warbling on the first-class "Perfect Murder" takes the album directly into Cure territory, as do the instrumentals which could equally find a home on Seventeen Seconds…

Later hailed as one of the key goth rock albums of the '80s and considered by many hardcore Cure fans to be the band's best album, Pornography was largely dismissed upon its 1982 release, witheringly reviewed as a leaden slab of whining and moping. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between: Pornography is much better than most mainstream critics of the time thought, but in retrospect, it's not the masterpiece some fans have claimed it to be. The overall sound is thick and murky, but too muddy to be effectively atmospheric in the way that the more dynamic Disintegration managed a few years later. For every powerful track like the doomy opener "One Hundred Years" and the clattering, desolate single "The Hanging Garden," there's a sound-over-substance piece of filler like "The Figurehead," which sounds suitably bleak but doesn't have the musical or emotional heft this sort of music requires…

Recorded in the midst of Robert Smith's tenuous tenure with Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Top is arguably the most hedonistic record the Cure ever produced. Essentially Smith and Lol Tolhurst working with studio musicians (this being the period when the Cure's lineup was never assured), it's an album obviously recorded under stress, drink, and drugs…