The Cure Trilogy

The Cure: Trilogy (Live In The Tempodrom Berlin November 2002) is a double live album video by The Cure, released on two double layer DVD-9 discs, and later on a single Blu-Ray disc. It documents The Trilogy Concerts, in which the three albums, Pornography (1982), Disintegration (1989) and Bloodflowers (2000) were played live in their entirety one after the other each night, the songs being played in the order in which they appeared on the albums…

It's hard to believe that the Cure could release an album even more sparse than Three Imaginary Boys, but here's the proof. The lineup change that saw funkstery bassist Michael Dempsey squeezed out in favor of the more specific playing of (eventually the longest serving member outside Robert Smith) Simon Gallup, and the addition of keyboardist Mathieu Hartley resulted in the band becoming more rigid in sound, and more disciplined in attitude. While it is not the study in loss that Faith would become, or the descent into madness of Pornography, it is a perfect precursor to those collections. In a sense, Seventeen Seconds is the beginning of a trilogy of sorts, the emptiness that leads to the questioning and eventual madness of the subsequent work…

Simultaneously more accessible and ambitious than any of the Cure's previous albums, the double album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me finds Robert Smith expanding his pop vocabulary by tentatively adding bigger guitars, the occasional horn section, lite-funk rhythms, and string sections. It's eclectic, to be sure, but it's also a mess, bouncing from idea to idea and refusing to develop some of the most intriguing detours. Even if Kiss Me doesn't quite gel, its best moments – including the deceptively bouncy "Why Can't I Be You?" and the stately "Just Like Heaven" – are remarkable and help make the album one of the group's very best.

Expanding the latent arena rock sensibilities that peppered Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by slowing them down and stretching them to the breaking point, the Cure reached the peak of their popularity with the crawling, darkly seductive Disintegration. It's a hypnotic, mesmerizing record, comprised almost entirely of epics like the soaring, icy "Pictures of You." The handful of pop songs, like the concise and utterly charming "Love Song," don't alleviate the doom-laden atmosphere. The Cure's gloomy soundscapes have rarely sounded so alluring, however, and the songs - from the pulsating, ominous "Fascination Street" to the eerie, string-laced "Lullaby" - have rarely been so well-constructed and memorable. It's fitting that Disintegration was their commercial breakthrough, since, in many ways, the album is the culmination of all the musical directions the Cure were pursuing over the course of the '80s.

Wisely, the Cure decided to start fresh upon signing with their new label in 2004 by cleaning house, remastering the old albums, and bringing their fans Join the Dots: B-Sides & Rarities, 1978-2001. Not only is it the ultimate companion to the official releases, but it is, in a way, the new-super-deluxe-updated version of that cassette release of Staring at the Sea. Every B-side is included, in order, with cleaned-up sound, liner notes, and explanations by the man who made it all happen. All tracks, from "10.15 Saturday Night" (the B-side to the debut single "Killing an Arab") to covers of "Hello, I Love You," "Purple Haze," and "World in My Eyes," to entries from the Bloodflowers singles, are an indication that while the Cure made both strong albums and singles, they were not afraid to experiment along the way, and more importantly, they didn't let pride keep them from not making them available to those who were willing to look for them…

For American ears only, in the years before a new deal with Elektra finally granted the Cure the access to the airwaves that they'd all but given up dreaming of, …Happily Ever After is nothing less than a two-for-one repackaging of the band's second and third European albums, the brooding gloom of Seventeen Seconds and the affirmative darkness of Faith. It makes for discomforting listening, both for newcomers to the sound of the early group and for fans more accustomed to experiencing the two records in separate sittings. Together with the band's fourth album, Pornography, the two LPs here were the sound of the Cure racing to distance themselves not simply from their early reputation as a moody power pop band, but also from any of the other comparisons, compadres, and contemporaries that the post-punk scene could throw at them. Seventeen Seconds, one U.K. review famously remarked, was the sound of the band sitting in a dark room, staring at clocks. Faith was what happened when those clocks stopped.

The Cure were never afraid of artistically defining themselves. They had their own sound, an eerie glamour surrounding a dark whimsicality, yet fans flocked to them throughout the '80s and '90s. Commercial or cult favorites, they're impressive as being one of the '80s' seminal bands who culled more than 30 critical singles. Compilations like 1986's Staring at the Sea: The Singles and 1997's Galore showcased the Cure's accessibility; therefore, having a solid greatest-hits collection might be a bit nonessential. Then again, releasing an album like this at the tip of the new millennium calls for a celebration, and that's what the Cure did. They collected 16 amazing cuts which spanned 23 years and recall what once was…

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…