Evidently, yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Disintegration by The Cure. News of that stately milestone sent a bit of a chill down my spine, given that the sprawling album in question was released only six days before I graduated from college. As such, the songs of Disintegration and my immediate post-collegiate experience are inexorably linked, in my memory. More to the point, that means I’ve been out of college for three goddamn decades, and still do not wholly feel like a functioning adult.
To commemorate this album’s young adulthood, scribes of all stripes have been posting think-pieces about the significance of Disintegration across the spectrum, from the monolithic space it occupies in the gestalt of The Cure’s sizable discography to the raft of personal anecdotes that wrap around such a work like ivy. Given the album’s deep wellspring of melancholy, it’s a collection of songs that seamlessly adhere themselves to listeners predisposed to melodrama.
When I first immersed myself in the album’s twelve tracks, I was a wide-eyed naif, nursing a wounded heart in the wake of what I considered an epic romance and what a newly former classmate considered a fleeting dalliance, a crucial difference in perspectives that she and I would never fully reconcile. Fittingly, the soggy sentimentality and brooding bittersweetness of Disintegration fit my overwrought emotional headspace like finely tailored funeral attire. I wallowed floridly in songs like “Last Dance,” “Plainsong,” “Closedown” and “Pictures of You,” finding dubious solace in Robert Smith’s anguish. Repeatedly revealing himself to be impulsive, tempestuous, smothering and conflicted, Smith’s lyrics have always been a riddle I’ve wrestled with. To what extent are they autobiographical? Or are they simply the inner monologue of a tortured protagonist? Smith himself, as far as I know, has been happily married to the enigmatic Mary Poole since the year before Disintegration was released. Regardless, if the target demographic of Robert Smith’s songwriting was dopily lovelorn twentysomethings, he certainly had my number.
Three decades later, Disintegration is still interwoven with my memories of being a dopey 22 year old, but its emotional resonance remains colossal. While my young self may have thought the stentorian thunderhead of sound that follows the deceptively placid windchimes of “Plainsong” summed up my heartbroken circumstances, I had not yet truly experienced all the tribulations life throws one’s way. The languid despair telegraphed in that song and the songs that follow can still evoke a windswept woe worthy of Emily Bronte or TS Eliot, robbed of their wrathful weight by those who’d reduce The Cure to simply doomy goths. Subtract the eyeliner, lipstick and morbid haystacks of hair, and these songs still come drenched in a variant of emphatically expressed remorse that is hard to match. Disintegration is frequently cited in tandem with its stylistic precursor from seven years earlier, Pornography, but ponderous bleakness aside, I’ve never really thought of them as that similar. There is a cold, roiling core of cruelty to 1982’s Pornography, but there is little heart. Conversely, while certainly damp with gloom, Disintegration is practically all heart.
So, while here I am, just as self-indulgently reminiscing about Disintegration like the rest of them, I feel eager to point out that, in certain instances, the live recordings of some of the album’s twelve songs that later surfaced on the bootleg-turned-limited-release Entreat actually better their studio iterations in both performance and cathartic emotional exorcism. Never is this more true, to my mind, than on the rendition of “Pictures of You” on Entreat, which finds the band further fleshing out the piece, particularly the guitar parts. Recorded in the gigantic expanse of Wembley Stadium, there’s a moment around six minutes and ten seconds into the song where you can hear Robert’s voice plaintively echo off the curves of that giant arena in a manner that suggests that even such a sizable venue cannot contain his mourning.
Is that hyperbole? Maybe so, but it’s still a gorgeous moment, to my ears.
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