The Cure
Trilogy

THE REVIEW

It was the last day of summer, a strange, cold day: the boy, disheveled and with smudged lipstick on his lips, sat on a small wall in his garden, a place he had always loved to consider as being outside the world, a secluded, almost suspended space, all his own. In this "non-place," the birds usually sang, perched on their trees, and their calls were almost a lullaby, if you sat quietly and listened to them, you could almost fall asleep.
But, as mentioned, that day was strange: the birds were not singing, in fact, there was no trace of them, but the young man didn't even realize, absorbed as he was in his thoughts. He held some photographs in his hand, faded and blurry shots in which two people were always clearly distinguishable, him and what was surely his girlfriend, or at least a girl important to him. In one photo they were tightly clasped together, close, happy, their bodies so united as to almost seem like Siamese twins... In another, you saw her running in a vast meadow, almost a plain... The young man leafed through them with a gaze between lost and melancholic, feeling a strange sensation, like the nostalgia felt for home... There, that girl was almost a home for him, a safe haven in tough times: she had seen him in crisis, had seen him fall and had lifted him up, they had gone through dark periods together, where they seemed never able to emerge from a sea made of dark, deep waters, but they always made it.
Then one day, at a party, she took his hand and asked him to dance: she had never done it, to be honest, he was almost convinced she didn't like dancing, and that request unsettled him a bit, though he accepted immediately. They were close, being lulled by the music, but her gaze was sad, there was no longer that familiar light that had animated her all these past years. Her eyes were dull, communicated silently, screamed a sadness with the loudest noise he had ever heard, they were almost disturbing, and he couldn't bear the weight. That slow dance lasted little but seemed to stretch for at least a hundred years, and when they parted he felt a shiver of cold, the same cold he felt now and then on that late summer day, sitting on the wall in the suspended garden. When their hands separated, he thought, "this is the first dance we have, but there won't be any others, it will be the last dance"... And how strange it was that the notes they were moving to were those of a love song...
From time to time the boy shook his head as if to rid his eyes of her image... "And if I saw her again...," he thought... "If only I could embrace her again...," he sighed... But then he shook his head as if to convince himself that there couldn't be any more "ifs," that was reality, and he would have to live in it; he had to stop looking at those photos he held in his hand, otherwise, that paper, those memories, would soon become the only feelings he could have, and the cold of that day would take place in his heart. He felt his soul in pieces, disintegrated, but that suffering had to end in one way or another, it had to be reduced to something short-term, something not lasting long; he didn’t want to find himself in twenty years, thirty-nine years old, still in that state. He reached out a hand towards a rose bush, thrust it in with force: he wanted to see if he could still feel at least physical pain, as the good Cash said... When he pulled it out, it was all streaked with blood, and a few drops had remained on the petals. "Bloodflowers," he thought, "like the Cure's album...". Well, at least a bit of pain he could feel, maybe there was still hope. If only something would move, if only he had some stimulus to restart... And that still, gray, and insensitive weather certainly didn’t help, it drove him crazy instead: he would have prayed for a bit of rain, at least it would have distracted him from the cold stupor into which he was falling.
Without a shred of strength, lazily, he let himself slide off the wall he was sitting on and walked towards the house.
He decided that the best way to forget everything, to vent, would be to grab his guitar and jot down a few notes, and write down some random memories, to exorcise his sadness and his demons. He also thought of a name for all this, "Untitled", because love, what he was experiencing, already had a name that summed up all his emotions, and there was no point in trying to give it a different one.

Recorded during a concert held in Berlin in 2002, in "Trilogy" The Cure perform live what Robert Smith has defined as his "dark trilogy", that is, the albums "Pornography", "Disintegration," and "Bloodflowers." From a technical point of view, they move with the mastery of those who have spent a lifetime together (give or take a day), playing with enviable understanding and empathy (just pay attention to the glances between Smith and Gallup). The atmospheres rendered are essentially the same as the records, and those who have loved these works, who have lived every single song contained in them, will certainly have no difficulty in feeling the same emotions experienced with the albums.
There is little else to add: you surely know the musical quality contained in these albums, and there are myriad reviews that have described them... But if you want to try something more, if you want to dive even more into the melancholic and desperate world described by Smith & Co. with those three masterpieces, well you can only sit and enjoy this wonderful live, and you will fall in love with it.