•
Rating: The first live album by The Cure deserves a moment of reflection. I saw it just the other day prominently displayed among the offers (…) of a supermarket where I was shopping, and immediately the memory of the LP, now worn out like a frisbee from my teenage years, came back to me, resting in peace somewhere among my records. The album in question is dated 1984, which places us in the thick of a band’s productive era, where in the decade '80 - '89 they gifted us seven studio albums. "Concert / The Cure Live" was released after "The Top", in the same year.
Why delve deeper into the only existing review of this disc? The reviewer who took care of this live album in 2006 did a good job, creating a text that entices and communicates the importance of this work without too much fuss. You could thus integrate (if you wish) the two reviews and read one for some insight on the tracks and this one for, hopefully, an enjoyable analysis of the impact of this release.
I saw The Cure live in recent, and hence paradoxically late, times. But I realized that the intensity of their stage shows is indeed a strength of the English band. If they achieve great results today, just imagine what they must have been like back then. This is the primary reason for my perfect score of 5. At the time, they were staging the dehydrated and dried-out carcass of punk, painting a fiery and arid canvas with noisy shades. A simple and dark rock, unadorned, giving the sensation of being exposed to a deadly sirocco that allows no appeal. The conceptual classification of this Concert as a musical pamphlet that includes the tenets of death rock comes naturally to me. But that would be too little.
Another element that emerges vividly from these performances, recorded between London and Oxford still in 1984, is the presence of a pronounced psychotic factor with sounds that evoke psychedelic frames and therefore do not truly carry out a dreamlike function but embed themselves in the slow motion of a self-revisitation through dreams. This music is, in fact, the precursor to the sounds of bands like Portishead and Massive Attack. Finally, there’s the transversal soul of this thrilling and overflowing live work: the rock. Preceded, in whatever form you perceive it, always by the root "post-". The dark wave of that era is logically the most objective reference, but even this, in the proliferation of emotions and sensations of identification, would incredibly say too little. For a good critical listening, one must contextualize and imagine being there in those years, with all that entails. One needs to have the foundations of '80s gothic rock to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the Concert.
You will thus find yourself before a wholly personal dark interpretation, where My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, Sisters Of Mercy, and even Lycia coexist in a synthesis, reduction, and personality operation that only the creative genius of Robert Smith & co. could orchestrate. A significant reductio ad unum, as it becomes the soil of sounds that push forward and become more contemporary and new. Although belonging to the first half of the '80s, this could very well be a '90s album given how fresh and new The Cure's live offering is. The hard rock is dissected to take only the useful parts like in a university anatomy lesson. Punk lies on the ground, and all that remains is the last gaze on the genre’s slain world, a view practically overturned and vertical, where the soul falls, leaving only the skeleton. Gothic rock travels between ethereal psychedelia and the scorching, living reality of a genre condemned to darkness.
The fans present must have been thrilled with the performance, marking each track with evident appreciation and sometimes participating in the singing. The tracklist is really well thought out. It invites purchase already on its own: "Shake Dog Shake", "Primary", "Charlotte Sometimes", "The Hanging Garden", "Give Me It", "The Walk", "One Hundred Years", "A Forest", "10:15 Saturday Night" and "Killing an Arab" are smart choices among indispensable classics and unexpected pieces. Overall, the best daguerreotype that could be taken of the band at the time. The cover artwork is dominated by black, leaving little room for white. Burned photos reduced to these two colors stand out in the rectangles on the front. On the back, within the area of the same rectangles, the names of the musicians. A minimalism that well expresses the spirit of a band nonetheless overflowing with macabre creativity.
Drop by the supermarket to see if there are any copies left.
Tracklist and Lyrics
01 Shake Dog Shake (04:14)
Ha ha ha!!!
Wake up in the dark
The aftertaste of anger in the back of my mouth
Spit it on the wall
And cough some more
And scrape my skin with razor blades
And make up in the new blood
And try to look so good
Follow me!
Make up in the new blood
And follow me to where the real fun is
Ha ha ha!!!
As stale and selfish as a sick dog
Spurning sex like an animal of god
I'll tear your red hair by the roots
And hold you blazing
Hold you cherished in the dead electric light
Your face
I'll never see you this way again
I captured it so perfectly
As if I knew you'd disappear away
Shake dog shake
You hit me again
You howl and hit me again
The same sharp pain
Wakes me in the dark
And cuts me from my throat to my pounding heart
My heart
My shaking heart
Shake dog shake
But we slept all night in the virgin's bed
And dreamed of death
And breathed like sick dogs
We slept all night in the virgin's bed
And breathed like death
And dreamed of sick dogs
Shake dog shake
Wake up wake up wake up!
Shake dog shake
Wake up wake up wake up!
Shake dog shake
Wake up in the new blood
Make up in the new blood
Shake up in the new blood
And follow me to where the real fun is...
Shake dog shake
02 Primary (03:29)
The innocence of sleeping children
Dressed in white
And slowly dreaming
Stops all time
I slow my steps and start to blur
So many years have filled my heart
I never thought I'd say those words
The further we go
And older we grow
The more we know
The less we show
The very first time I saw your face
I thought of a song
And quickly changed the tune
The very first time I touched your skin
I thought of a story
And rushed to reach the end
Too soon
Oh remember
Please
Don't change
And so the fall came
Thirteen years
A shiny ring
And how I could forget your name
The air no longer in my throat
Another perfect lie is choked
But it always feels the same
So they close together
Dressed in red and yellow
Innocent forever
Sleeping children in their blue soft rooms
Still dream...
03 Charlotte Sometimes (04:06)
All the faces
All the voices blur
Change to one face
Change to one voice
Prepare yourself for bed
The light seems bright
And glares on white walls
All the sounds of
Charlotte sometimes
Into the night with
Charlotte sometimes
Night after night she lay alone in bed
Her eyes so open to the dark
The streets all looked so strange
They seemed so far away
But Charlotte did not cry
The people seemed so close
Playing expressionless games
The people seemed
So close
So many
Other names...
Sometimes I'm dreaming
Where all the other people dance
Sometimes I'm dreaming
Charlotte sometimes
Sometimes I'm dreaming
Expressionless the trance
Sometimes I'm dreaming
So many different names
Sometimes I'm dreaming
The sounds all stay the same
Sometimes I'm dreaming
She hopes to open shadowed eyes
On a different world
Come to me
Scared princess
Charlotte sometimes
On that bleak track
(See the sun is gone again)
The tears were pouring down her face
She was crying and crying for a girl
Who died so many years before...
Sometimes I dream
Where all the other people dance
Sometimes I dream
Charlotte sometimes
Sometimes I dream
The sounds all stay the same
Sometimes I'm dreaming
There are so many different names
Sometimes I dream
Sometimes I dream...
Charlotte sometimes crying for herself
Charlotte sometimes dreams a wall around herself
But it's always with love
With so much love it looks like
Everything else
Of Charlotte sometimes
So far away
Glass sealed and pretty
Charlotte sometimes
04 The Hanging Garden (04:05)
Creatures kissing in the rain
Shapeless in the dark again
In the hanging garden
Please don't speak
In the hanging garden
No one sleeps
Catching haloes on the moon
Gives my hands the shapes of angels
In the heat of the night
The animals scream
In the heat of the night
Walking into a dream...
Fall fall fall fall
Into the walls
Jump jump out of time
Fall fall fall fall
Out of the sky
Cover my face as the animals cry
In the hanging garden
Creatures kissing in the rain
Shapeless in the dark again
In a hanging garden
Change the past
In a hanging garden
Wearing furs and masks...
Fall fall fall fall
Into the walls
Jump jump out of time
Fall fall fall fall
Out of the sky
Cover my face as the animals die
In the hanging garden
In the hanging garden
05 Give Me It (02:49)
Get away from me
Get your fingers out of my face
This room's so hot
This room's so hot
I break the walls
Get away from me
Leave me alone
Like the pig on the stairs
Hanging
In a groovy purple shirt
Gasping for air
I'm gasping for air
I'm gasping for love
I'm gasping for air...
Slit the cats like cheese
Then eat the sweet sticky things
Suck harder!
Suck harder!
Suck your insides
Insides out!
Blood thick swimming round your feet
As you're choking
Choking
Choking on the fleshy words
Give me it give me it give me it
Deaden my glassy mind
Give me it give me it
Make me blind
One step back and one step down
And slip the needles in my side...
My head is cold
My hands are cold
My heart is cold
My heart is black
And stops every fucking night
Every night
I wait until it stops...
Sing birds sing birds sing birds sing
Get away...
06 The Walk (03:31)
I called you after midnight
Then ran until I burst
I passed the howling woman
And stood outside your door
We walked around a lake
And woke up in the rain
And everyone turned over
Troubled in their dreams again
Visiting time is over
And so we walk away
And both play dead then cry out loud
Why we always cry this way?
I kissed you in the water
And made your dry lips sing
I saw you look
Like a Japanese baby
In an instant I remembered everything...
I called you after midnight
Then ran until my heart burst
I passed the howling woman
And stood outside your door
I kissed you in the water
And made your dry lips sing
I saw you look
Like a Japanese baby
In an instant I remembered everything...
07 One Hundred Years (06:48)
It doesn't matter if we all die
Ambition in the back of a black car
In a high building there is so much to do
Going home time
A story on the radio...
Something small falls out of your mouth
And we laugh
A prayer for something better
A prayer
For something better
Please love me
Meet my mother...
But the fear takes hold
Creeping up the stairs in the dark
Waiting for the death blow
Stroking your hair as the patriots are shot
Fighting for freedom on the television
Sharing the world with slaughtered pigs
Have we got everything?
She struggles to get away...
The pain
And the creeping feeling
A little black haired girl
Waiting for Saturday
The death of her father pushing her
Pushing her white face into the mirror
Aching inside me
And turn me round
Just like the old days
Just like the old days
Caressing an old man
And painting a lifeless face
Just a piece of new meat in a clean room
The soldiers close in under a yellow moon
All shadows and deliverance
Under a black flag
A hundred years of blood
Crimson
The ribbon tightens round my throat
I open my mouth
And my head bursts open
A sound like a tiger thrashing in the water
Thrashing in the water
Over and over
We die one after the other
Over and over
We die one after the other after the other...
It feels like a hundred years
One hundred years...
08 A Forest (06:46)
Come closer and see
See into the trees
Find the girl
While you can
Come closer and see
See into the dark
Just follow your eyes
Just follow your eyes
I hear her voice
Calling my name
The sound is deep
In the dark
I hear her voice
And start to run
Into the trees
Into the trees
Into the trees
Suddenly I stop
But I know it's too late
I'm lost in a forest
All alone
The girl was never there
It's always the same
I'm running towards nothing
Again and again and again
10 Killing an Arab (02:51)
Standing on a beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the Arab on the ground
See his open mouth
But hear no sound
I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an Arab
I can turn and walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I choose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing
I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an Arab
Feel the steel butt jump
Smooth in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring at myself
Reflected in the eyes of
The dead man on the beach
The dead man
On the beach
I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an Arab
Loading comments slowly
