The Cure
Five Swings Live [extended play]

THE REVIEW

Published in 1996, this live mini-CD is similar to "Entreat" compared to the corresponding "Disintegration" of its time, which is to say it's a direct capture of the band grappling with their most current material, in a sense a reading of the Crawley combo's state of the art from the most important perspective: that of the stage and implicitly of the audience.

The "Swings" featured here are: 1. Want 2. Club America 3. Mint Car 4. Trap 5. Treasure. Let's state right away that the Cure handle themselves live as well as few others do: mastery of their instruments, theatricality, perfect performances, and vocal virtuosity. The sense of overwhelming heterogeneity and eclecticism further exacerbated by the not-so-happy selection of material for the 1996 album is quite dampened in the live versions. "Want", above all, sounds powerful and decisive, it's the ideal opening for any live show one might imagine; the rest is not bad at all: "Club America" has a (as noted) "Never Enough" vibe, perhaps with distant echoes of JAMC/shoegazers' psychedelia, "Trap" maintains perfect rhythmic continuity with the other two songs from "Wild Mood Swings" mentioned, a linear and weighty track; in the live version, you can hear the distorted, very post-punk bass of Simon Gallup on whose lines the entire live sound is structured, echoes of the atmospheric coldness of the Cocteau Twins and the more recent visionary fascination of "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea". Rhythmic continuity unfortunately broken by the first of the remaining two, "Mint Car", the only hit present here, a theoretically cultured and refined synth-psychedelic pop-song, in practice an episode that too openly retraces (or recalls) "Friday I'm In Love" to fully convince, while the right path is re-established by "Treasure" tender love-ballad, romantic and dreamy. 

A pity. Had they played, for example, "Adonais" instead of the mentioned track number three, it would have been perfect even from a strictly qualitative perspective, but it remains a good document of the world tour performances (also because Smith and Co. in subsequent years will practically no longer perform anything from "Wild Mood Swings" live in the later shows except for "Want"), the art-work alone would be a sufficient reason, but... join the dots... catch the kiss (only for lovers).