The Cure
Greatest Hits [Limited ed. Double disc]

THE REVIEW

Talking about "Greatest Hits" in relation to the Cure, who have remained more of a "cult band" compared to other bands from the early eighties (Depeche Mode, U2, REM), despite their success increasing album after album, is somewhat puzzling. It becomes a bit less so when you consider that with this collection (the third, if you include the more comprehensive "Standing On A Beach" and "Galore", which are programmatically collections of singles), it symbolically marks (and not only that: it's a commercial re-launch of well-known material for a new and, hopefully, wider audience) the closure of the label's cycle that Chris Parry, after listening to the promo tape of "Arab/10:15", decided to create ad hoc for the group: Fiction. Something comparable to the English slogan of the famous South Korean car company, paraphrasing: "Designed Around Cure".

A confirmation, if it were still needed, that the writing of Smith and Co. has always been articulated in two creatively very different moments: experimentation, with its dark shadows and visionary distortions, which have practically exclusively earned the Cure the status of a "Dark-wave" band (a sub-genre initially codified by Siouxie & The Banshees, but poorly managed by them), and the attitude towards the pop-song, which now distinctly separated, now interpenetrated with the aforementioned dimension, has increasingly become the unmistakable signature of the Cure-sound over the years.

As is well known, a singles collection is one thing, a "best of" is another: the two don't always coincide. But it is also clear that in the case of the Cure (who do not have "evergreen" hits like "Everything Counts" or "Sunday Bloody Sunday" in their repertoire), the most successful pieces are precisely the pop-songs. A crystal-clear demonstration of this is the selection of tracks included here: "Boys Don't Cry" (the first, timid hit, but one that led the Crawley band to re-release an "updated" version for the US market of the material included in the first real album, "Three Imaginary Boys", in a second album where the track appeared as the title track), three singles from the pseudo-album "Japanese Whispers" ("The Lovecats", "Let's Go To Bed" and "The Walk"), notably the exclusion of the only single from "Pornography" ("The Hanging Garden" is missing), likewise for "Faith" ("Primary" was discarded), while "A Forest" forcefully could not be missing (despite lacking the cited requisites).

From the subsequent years, those of the real hits, we find "Inbetween Days", "Close To Me", (from "The Head On The Door"), then "Why Can't I Be You?" and the inevitable "Just Like Heaven" from the "Kiss Me" album (the other 2 singles were excluded), from "Disintegration", "Lullaby" (another inevitable radio hit) and "Love Song" (comparable to the techno-pop of New Order) are drawn, then the "original 7"" version of "Never Enough" (the video was truly a masterpiece) continues with "High" and "Friday I'm In Love" leading to "Wish", the highest-success album, from the super-criticized "Wild Mood Swings" only "Mint Car" appears (the other three singles are excluded), followed by the (then) unreleased "Wrong Number", and the two true novelties: "Cut Here" and "Just Say Yes". The first is a genuinely beautiful and airy romantic song, while the second is more upbeat and infiltrated by some minimalist electronic in the synth-pop vein. As noticed, there's also every reference missing to "Bloodflowers" (the two promotional EPs "Out Of This World" and "Maybe Someday" were limited to radio stations). It's notable that in the Asia and South-Pacific version, the sequence is slightly different: "The Caterpillar" fortunately appears, and from "Disintegration" "Pictures of You" is also drawn while "The Walk" is excluded, for space reasons.

The double CD edition reprises in the second disc ("since our fans already have all these songs," as a trailer on the official site states) the alternative versions, rearranged and re-recorded in an acoustic key of all the hits from the first disc. More homogeneous, as you hear the Cure in "2001 version" across all tracks, and interesting, since live performances expose the beauty of the original songs (as is the case with "A Forest" and "Cut Here", for example), also giving an idea of updating the same songs.

In summary, an absolutely "obvious" album as with all bands (and absolutely unnecessary for anyone who owns just the two mentioned diachronic collections), in which, aside from the (really pleasant and in some cases interesting) "acoustic" disc, the only other point of interest is the two unreleased tracks "Cut Here" and "Just Say Yes".

A final uncertainty (the main one) must be mentioned however: if it's about pop-songs, why exclude the most beautiful of all, namely "Charlotte Sometimes" which provided a romantic counterpoint to the nightmares of "Faith"? Mysterious Ways...