The Cure
Disintegration

THE REVIEW

1989. The playful jolts of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me are a memory: in the eyes of Robert Smith, obviously rimmed in black, return the ancient anxieties, the old worries, the renewed paranoias enriched by the malaise of a newlywed thirty-something. After the pop facets appeared here and there, "Disintegration" gathers the leaden shards left on the ground seven years earlier by "Pornography" and assembles a new great (perhaps the greatest) chapter in the history of the Cure.

Chinese drops fall into the pond when suddenly a majestic and luminous explosion of deep yet sweet sounds envelops the landscape with its measured and solemn rhythm. "Plainsong" is there to say that the clownish Robert Smith has taken a vacation and has returned to venture into his mirrored labyrinths, immersed like never before in oceans of artfully created keyboards. The sad and gloomy yet sweet and anesthetized reflections serve as the solemn and bewildering opening to a newly homogeneous album.
"Pictures Of You" is a bit slimmer, characterized by the familiar echo-laden interplay between guitars and bass: the role of the double (here represented by the photographs leafed through, collected, and analyzed) often recurs in Smith's poetry, whether it is another person or a reflection of oneself. The slow but determined glide down a corridor of warm ice accentuates Robert's clear singing and the guitar work, never over the top but always meticulously crafted: a melancholic embrace perfectly packaged.
The fathomless beats, reassuring yet threatening at the same time, crafted by Williams and Gallup introduce "Closedown", another musical behemoth upon which O'Donnell constructs imposing electronic walls, more exciting than ever. The guitar reverberations bounce, slightly jostled in this room of mirrors at the bottom of the sea, carried by a current of synthesizers towards Smith’s distressed recounting of his oppressive sense of aging; the conscious sadness of not being able to fill up with emotions, the heavy burden of an age that has never truly belonged to him, a thick and dense wind of conflicting sensations: all in a magnificent painting of heavy smoothness.

The next track, "Lovesong", is the album's turning point: not so much in the sounds, which are slightly less oppressive, but in the themes. The song is indeed Robert Smith's wedding gift to his lifelong partner, Mary Poole; the piece is essentially an anthem to his wife, a refraction of the most sweetly melancholic part of the sad clown. Less swollen with sounds but at the same time sinisterly hollowed, "Lovesong" is indeed a love song, but painted in gothic and joyously dark characters.
Time once more stretches and gets lost in sound oceans and soft melancholic streams, the six-string voice multiplies in a thousand wandering bubbles in the dark, while the sung verses fit perfectly within the black frame: "Last Dance" is Cure at one hundred percent, full of sounds and meanings yet bearer of a constant and invincible sense of emptiness.

The most well-known track from the album, "Lullaby", is a strange horror lullaby typically British, lacking much logical sense yet penetrating. Dear Robert (immortalized in the song's video in improbable striped pajamas as he battles a giant spider) whispers the lullaby marked by a granitic and spasmodic rhythm: the terror of being consumed by the spider-man protagonist is the same as being the creature itself, in another mirror representation of a nighttime tale. The skittering and the rapid, shaky stride of the monster are perfectly depicted by O'Donnell’s strings, synthesized now schizophrenic and now spread out in a terrifying yet at the same time so catchy web.
"Fascination Street" is more overwhelming than ever, a race in the night led by Gallup’s spectacular bass that starts, ignites, and never stops. The guitar specters pass quickly by the window, distorted and empty as if soaked in acid, while the drops of electronics fall quickly upon, shaken off by Williams’ hammering and Smith’s voice: a perfect rock song.

The sounds try to grow in "Prayers For Rain", but are thrown into an endless whirlpool, a space without gravity where fiery tongues float commandingly, twisting, suffocating, and tightening their grip. The electronic steps approach ever closer, looming in this claustrophobic and menacing fresco. Water is seen as an element of salvation, even prayed for, in stark contrast with the vision of jailer and common prison of the subsequent "The Same Deep Water As You": a cell of problems and drowning feelings. Here Robert Smith tries to fight against the anesthetizing effect of the gently storming sea, an incredible work by O'Donnell in recreating the exact sensation of rain in the ocean. Every single note by Thompson is a bright stroke to escape the waves, the slow-motion shipwreck occurring in Smith’s heart, slow but inevitable, so much so that kisses once a means of vampiric games become a common epitaph, in the last underwater union before oblivion.

"Disintegration" is more energetic instead, loaded as usual with electronic walls, granitic rhythm, and luminous specters flickering in the black sky. Here Smith almost manages to express anger, not just melancholy and resignation, for the things gone, disintegrated in fact, that he will no longer experience and have. The piece is almost mocking in highlighting with cheerful punctuation some murky memories, while Smith's delicate and feeble scream grows as time goes by, surrounded by his own ghosts of a time.
"Homesick" is sad, stripped of unnecessary trimmings and folded in on itself in an icy cocoon of tears. The bouncing of the drums resembles that of a broken puppet, the guitars wander sobbing among electronic weavings, reluctantly avoiding Gallup’s threatening but exhausted bass and reaching the dusty piano set who knows how many years ago: the magnificence of regret is set aside, leaving only a faint crescendo of bitterness, straight to the heart like a simple but amazing jagged dart.
The concluding track of the album allows the music and words to say goodbye, without needing a title ("Untitled", indeed). The voice-guitar-keyboard blend conveys conscious resignation, translating into song that typical shy, sad yet vital smile Robert Smith has borne for a lifetime. The eyes are still moist as the guitars intertwine for one last slow and beautiful dance before disappearing onto the horizon and leaving the organ, distant, in the dark.

"Disintegration" takes the mirrored labyrinths of "Seventeen Seconds", the resigned sadness of "Faith", and the hellish darkness of "Pornography", immersing it all in O'Donnell's electronic wells and throwing away the playfulness of just two years before. The result is an album of compact and coherent sound, fascinating, sad and cold as the night, and as emotional as only the masterpiece of the Cure can be.