The Cure
4Play

It is not entirely clear whether the collection "4Play", a promotional CD downloadable from the i-Tunes website, is exactly a collection of songs that constitutes a true compilation of an "interlocutory" nature (awaiting the next announced new album of unreleased tracks), or if it is a more "light" commercial proposal, considering the choice that downloading offers to those who already possess part (half or slightly less) of the tracks listed here.

However, what matters at this moment, given the fact that the group's fans surely possess the past editions of the four albums from which the respective singles are taken, interspersed with the live version of another track from the same albums in the years of their respective tours, is a broader consideration of what R. Smith's band currently represents, signifies, and manages to express artistically and commercially. Looking at and reliving those moments (the first 4 albums in fact, simplifying a bit the discographic philology) from the perspective of 2006, perhaps holds the meaning of "recontextualizing" the entire work of The Cure, which unfolds from the late '70s to the last self-titled album, "The Cure".

Many things have happened in the meantime, but it is worth retracing them, both to dispel some commonplaces that have been repeated too often, and because generally the understanding of the future is reinforced and clarified by focusing on (now that the appropriate temporal distances exist) the past. Leaving aside the second part of the CD, related to interviews, we can identify in these first 4 albums ("Three Imaginary Boys", "Seventeen Seconds", "Faith", "Pornography", with the omission of the more known "Boys Don't Cry", originally actually born as an "enriched" and "mitigated" reissue of the first "hit", of the more experimental and elusive aforementioned first album), the first segment of The Cure's stylistic and creative parabola, from the psychedelic-post punk-pop debut that in fact underlay without revealing it the creative epicenter of the subsequent "trilogy", seventeen seconds-faith-pornography, works in which the Crawley band codified its expressive modus.

'Seventeen Seconds' represents a masterpiece of rock-psychedelic minimalism centered on the sound produced by keyboards and bass (Play For Today), with essential guitar lines, yet subtly enclosed in an infinite dimension, like the intuition of cosmic space beyond the tree line. If the keyboards "open" the sound horizon to great inner scenarios, the dynamism of bass and guitars produces an "implosive" effect (à la Joy Division) that perfectly conveys the idea of angst and the sense of suspended fate that will characterize Robert Smith's entire poetics ("M", "Seventeen Seconds"), up to the aestheticization of movement as an almost "visual" inner/outer suggestion created by the kinematic "A Forest". "Faith", on one hand, more openly develops such poetics of uncertainty and doubt, suspended between abandonment and despair ("The Drowning Man", "Doubt"), and seeking refuge from such existential pain ("Faith"), on the other hand, along the musical side, seems to impoverish (in a "subtractive" way) the arrangements of the previous work from the presence of guitars and certain keyboards that from being infinite, or at times romantic and dreamy, here become heavy and leaden.

Also centered on the interaction between large scenarios and a dimension of suffering intimacy, "Faith" as a whole gives the idea of a thin but pervasive fear and anxiety, which ultimately constitutes the backbone of the entire creative period. "Pornography", destined to become the "manifesto" of Dark as a sub-genre of new wave, explodes such tensions that move from the interior plane to the sound side: roaring and distorted guitars to the limits of pure noise ("Pornography"), cadenced and hyperkinetic drum machine (the flagship song of the entire dark epic "One Hundred Years"), which, however, in the course of the work dissolve into sweeter and more romantic melodies, slower and almost hypnotic rhythms ("A Strange Day", "A Short Term Effect"), up to delicate and moving suites like the splendid "Siamese Twins", even if intentionally weighted and distorted, even if illuminated by a sinister and dreamlike light, are "songs" that miraculously manage to achieve a balance between the power of drumming, the heaviness of bass lines, harsh and corrosive guitars, and lyricism of the lyrics (an example: "The Figurehead"); "Pornography" constitutes a point of no return beyond which the group will encounter a series of increasing difficulties until the temporary dissolution of the group, but which (fortunately) will lead to growth and artistic and expressive maturation.

The integration, difficult but gradually achieved, of the pop component in the form codified by these first four albums, will lead Robert Smith's group to create more open and contaminated songs, now almost electro-pop ("The Walk"), now exotic and psychedelic ("The Caterpillar"), up to the fulfillment of such synthesis in the albums that mark the gradual evolution of the sound and the conquest of increasingly larger parts of the audience ("The Head on the Door", "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me"), the most monumental and mature works from the musical perspective ("Disintegration", "Wish") the 1st place in the charts reached in 1992, the difficult gestation of an album ("Wild Mood Swings"), disorienting and perhaps quite misunderstood by some part of the criticism, actually characterizes one of the most fluid and creative moments of Robert Smith and Co, up to "Bloodflowers", announced as sort of an epilogue to the group's career.

In a sense, it was so, with the clarification that it was the end of a cycle, that of the British Fiction, and certainly not of The Cure. The self-titled album, (not coincidentally) titled "The Cure", comes out after the contract with Geffen, a much more commercially powerful American major, and this is the current context in which to observe what the group still manages to say. It is certainly not little, and once again negative criticisms highlight the partial difficulty in focusing on the evolution of a talent,R. Smith's, which, albeit controversially expressed, has few equals. Ultimately, The Cure are and remain The Cure, a group that has given a lot, and that a lot, within the limits of any artistic career, can still give. What is a bit "disorienting" at the moment is not the group's music, but in my opinion, the label's management.

This compilation indeed does not have a clear meaning, nor especially does the reissue in deluxe packaging with "enhanced CD", and bonus tracks CD attached of previous albums, containing previously unavailable (also because intentionally inaccessible) material appear justifiable, now paid (by those who have loved this group for many years, like the writer) at a much higher price.