The Cure
Pornography

THE REVIEW

The masterpiece of the first dark generation. The ecstasy of the depressed and hallucinated Robert Smith, not yet out of the intoxicating spiral that characterized his life at the time and, consequently, his creations.

The year is 1982, punk now lives only as a frayed fashion and the groups born from the first wave of post-punk disperse into the colorful and gypsy tide that is New Wave. There are those who continue with electro-rock experiments, those who focus on noise, those who wink more at the mainstream. And then there is the people of makeup and black eyeshadow.
Commonly defined as dark, gothic rock listeners represent an important branch of new wave acolytes, fashionable followers in the style of Siouxsie Sioux and Smith himself (who, incidentally, collaborated for a long time with Siouxsie's Banshees). In that year, The Cure released "Pornography", a suicide record from the group's first dark journey out of Crawley (to close the triptych composed with Seventeen Seconds and Faith). In 2003, it will be considered the first element of The Cure's Dark Trilogy (along with Disintegration and Bloodflowers). The band's lineup (which throughout its history has seen an impressive number of members, with only singer-guitarist-creator Robert Smith serving as the common element) at the time consisted, besides Smith, of the two most significant members in the group's history: Simon Gallup on bass and Lol Tolhurst on drums. The three crafted all 8 tracks of the album (few, but with an average length of over 5 minutes per song).

The album opens with what is perhaps its best piece, as well as its longest, "One Hundred Years": Tolhurst's neurotic and metronomic drumming launches the track vertically, while Smith's chilling guitar sounds open it horizontally, vibrating in the dense dark sea created by Gallup and the synthesizers. The electronic part is significant in the album: although still distant from the cascading keyboards that Roger O'Donnell will paint for "Disintegration" seven years later, it helps create a sonic vortex of daze, a black abyss from which Smith's very unique voice sometimes emerges as a beam of light, sometimes as the grim chant of a dying siren. The lyrics of the time are among the most depressed ever written, so much so that the album opens with "It doesn't matter if we all die". "A Short Term Effect" is a museum of echoes and reverbs, while with "The Hanging Garden" the skeletal rhythm of Tolhurst fills with toms, as if to highlight the listener's downward race, pursued by guitar reverbs. "Siamese Twins" starts slow and paced and accompanies Smith's laments, emerging, flowing, and fading with the same magical simplicity.

The album crosses the midpoint with the magnificent and darkest "The Figurehead", in a triumph of toms and bass notes dug directly from the Earth's core. The rhythm is the same lamenting march toward implosion (indeed, toward the disintegration of 1989), with Smith's spectral guitar punctuating the path traced by his voice, coming from a cavern of inner despair. The natural continuation is "A Strange Day", with its Vangelis-like synthesizers (it is, after all, the year of Blade Runner) weaving the carpet for an excellent guitar performance by Smith.
"Cold" is more unsettling than cold, with keyboards raising huge walls while simultaneously sketching strange insects scuttling over them with an icy sound, all soaked in the now familiar comatose Sabbath-like advance dictated by Tolhurst. The album closes with the title track, "Pornography" precisely, which starts with a sampled television conversation but seems to come directly from a cold lunar landscape, and slowly the shadow army advances suffocated amidst the dust. The electronic storm here is minimal, made of strange metallic voices, perfect for a trip gone wrong.

"Pornography" ends after a gloomy 43-minute journey into the alienating landscape that is Robert Smith's mind, capable of turning the dry lines of the early works into liquid vats of acid in which to immerse his obsessions, giving birth to a distorted and suffering creature, endowed with the macabre charm that only a work of the Imaginary Boys from Crawley can have.