The Cure
The Top

THE REVIEW

"The Top" is a strange album... One of those albums that if you don't fully understand, you can't love or even appreciate.
It's usually the least praised among all the 80's albums produced by The Cure, and maybe that's inevitable because it's compared to heavyweight pillars like "Faith", "Pornography", and "Disintegration", or because it has an aura of crazy combination of sounds, colors, and images and a sense of drunken lightness. But it is often also referred to as the WORST ALBUM under the sacred permission of the Better "Wild Mood Swings".
Personally, I find all this quite unfair.

"The Top" remains one of the most absurd yet also artistically great moments in Cure's history! All that sensation that pervades upon listening to the 10 tracks is already an important sign, as well as being anything but a symbol of a weak album as many claim.
"The Top" is appearance. I will never forget the first time I listened to it, opened it... an invasion of undulating psychedelic color fusions. I would call it the drugged apotheosis.
It seems like the stupid sequel of a pop experiment named "Japanese Whispers" that lasted just long enough to understand that The Cure were not at all dead; it seems too shallow after the massacres of "Pornography", which fascinated the 'goths par excellence' who are sad and depressed and cannot stain themselves with madness of any color other than black. But in reality, it is stupid and shallow the analysis process that such 'slanderers' think they have done with such an authorial flair as "The Top".
"Shake Dod Shake" opens an idyll of stumbles and rambling illusions to the destructive sound of a bloodstain, and it's like having Robert's lipstick-smeared mouth in front of us, which nervously shakes screaming something to which only in our imagination can we give a name. "Bird Mad Girl" bursts in like a sudden fall and joyfully mourns remembering the figure of Mary, another indelible symbol of Cure's music, in an animalistic revisitation of life, hallucinated, envisioned, imagined. "Dressing Up" is a slow awakening in which, in my opinion, Robert showcases his greatest interpreting ability (of himself, of course) and lets us "go under slowly," immersing us in his undulating voice.
"The Empty World" the third chapter of the saga "Charlotte Sometimes" with almost medieval echoes, and closes "The Top", after various funny episodes, among which definitely the most is the personal analysis of "Piggy In The Mirror" in which Robert lets the little pig elevate leaving to itself that feline part which forms his person... with a slow (and spiteful) affirmation "The Top Is The Place Where Nobody Goes... YOU JUST IMAGINE IT ALL...! " confirming what I wrote above...

Only semblances, only impression... You simply imagined it all.
This is ART!!!