Pornography

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Retrospective views of Pornography have been far more favourable. [8] In his biography of the Cure, Never Enough: The Story of the Cure, Jeff Apter wrote that it "turned out to be the kind of album—just like Lou Reed's Berlin or Bowie's coke-fueled Low—that required some distance and a good few years of music history to be really appreciated". [8] In 1995, Mark Coleman of Rolling Stone noted that Pornography had come to be "revered by Cureheads as a masterstroke", while noting that "normal listeners will probably find it impenetrable". [8] Stewart Mason of AllMusic found it to be "much better than most mainstream critics of the time thought", but at the same time "not the masterpiece some fans have claimed it to be" and "just a bit too uneven to be considered a classic". [24] In 2004, Jaime Gill of BBC Music singled out the album's "sonic depth and sheer relentless conviction" for praise, adding that without these qualities, its "extraordinary misanthropy would be laughable". [34] Uncut called Pornography "a masterpiece of claustrophobic self-loathing." [35]

Gill, Jaime (2 December 2004). "The Cure Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography (Deluxe Editions) Review". BBC Music . Retrieved 28 October 2012. Not an album for the faint hearted I would add. There's no Love Cats or Inbetween Days here folks, just sheer misery but such wondrous grand misery, the music peels out in a glorious manner. Thanks Robert !! We were called DNA from Wakefield and have a few releases listed even on here. But it's mainly down to The Cure and this album that affected my guitar playing and song writing style.Secondly, the lyrics, a litany of unrelated snapshot horror imagery, line after line of seemingly unrelated scenarios of (social/political/metaphysical) discord and carnage. “Stroking your hair as the patriots are shot / Fighting for freedom on the television / Sharing the world with slaughtered pigs…” and then, apropos of nothing, the author then interjects “Have we got everything?…she struggles to get away…”

a b Mason, Stewart. " Pornography – The Cure". AllMusic. Archived from the original on 24 July 2018 . Retrieved 21 March 2018. Indeed, in 2003, The Cure performed all three albums in their entirely, in chronological sequence on a tour, which was later captured film and officially released as the DVD ‘Trilogy’. Well, to be truthful, in light of what transpired a few weeks later when he took the band out on their Fourteen Explicit Moments tour, he had taken the Cure as far as they could possibly go down that particular road. Because the band self-destructed shortly afterwards after a fight at a bar in Strasbourg when Smith and Simon Gallup came to blows, the pressure of maintaining the sheer intensity of the material by having to perform it and the rigours of touring anyway, having a detrimental effect on the mental health and wellbeing of the entire band and their crew. a b Considine, J. D. (2 September 1982). " Pornography". Rolling Stone . Retrieved 13 October 2012. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Apter, Jeff (2006). Never Enough: The Story of The Cure. Omnibus Press. ISBN 1-84449-827-1.Breakthrough top 40 hit A Forest (number 31 in March 1980) distilled all of the album’s strongest elements into one near-six minute slice of post-punk perfection. It’s still one of the greatest ’80s singles of all time.

Ironically, for a band that prided itself initially on being defiantly anti image, the 1982 Pornography era was effectively the very first time the band actually had an identifiable image to speak of. Unsurprisingly, it soon became their trademark. Abebe, Nitsuh (12 May 2005). "The Cure: Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography". Pitchfork . Retrieved 13 October 2012. Put simply, One Hundred Years is by far the most thrilling and terrifying opening act of any top 10 album from 1982. It’s probably still for me at least the strongest and most compulsively powerful opener on any Cure album period. There is nothing that comes even a third of the way close to its sheer rancorous claustrophobia, existential despair and sense of absolute ‘end of the world’ dread.Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge.

Out went their regular producer Mike Hedges, who helped craft the sonic ambience of their previous two albums, and in came a previously unknown engineer whom Smith decided to hand the reins to – Phil Thornalley. Smith was reportedly impressed with his work as assistant engineer on a Psychedelic Furs album the previous year (Talk Talk Talk), in particular the drum sound, so set to work on consciously writing drum patterns specifically tailored for the new material he was working on that would comprise the new album, which would be less downbeat and far more intense. For me at least, The Cure had always been this unassuming new wave act who had that brilliant first top 40 hit A Forest in the glorious year of 1980 (who were labelmates with The Passions, who had their only hit, I’m In Love With A German Film Star, in 1981) and then abruptly disappeared again…. but I was obviously not paying much attention. Maybe I thought they were just Joy Division copyists? Released in May 1982, Pornography bore zero resemblance to anything else that was around at the time. Despite it surprisingly hitting the top ten at number eight and thus their most successful album to date (setting off a chain of consecutive top ten studio albums for the band which only ended in 1996), it was the ultimate party-pooper of a record when placed in direct contrast to everything else around it (mostly exponents from the aforementioned New Pop Renaissance). Its sheer impenetrable sense of nihilistic doom and existential angst immediately set it apart from the rest of their contemporaries.Roberts guitar sound here made me change my own guitar set up. I went out and bought a digital echo unit, placed upon the top of a mike stand, so I could easily manipulate the controls in real time during a live performance. I did not need to use any other effect pedals at all, just layers of tumbling echo. In 2017, Damnation A.D. released a cover version of the entire album. Xiu Xiu and Chelsea Wolfe covered "One Hundred Years" on Xiu Xiu's 2021 album Oh No.