Faith

The Cure | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Original Release Date: 1981
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Elektra / Wea
• ASIN: B000002H5P
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #134,045 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Holy Hour

2. Primary

3. Other Voices

4. All Cats Are Grey

5. The Funeral Party

6. Doubt

7. The Drowning Man

8. Faith

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drowning at The Cure's Funeral Party, July 26, 2000

By 

S. Johnston (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Faith (Audio CD)

I have every Cure album. I love this album, and "Pornography", because they are (to me) The Cure's two "trance" albums (for want of better words), they distort the room's ambience and twist your head. Both Faith and Pornography are best appreciated by lying down on the floor with your eyes closed and head between the stereo's speakers. Just lie still and let Faith's reverbing emptiness slowly descend and wash over you and it will put you into it's trance. You'll progress effortlessly through these moody tracks, rolling along with the momentum of "Primary", soaking up Smith's disturbed ambience in "The Holy Hour"... and by the time you get through "All Cat's Are Grey" and "The Funeral Party" it will have meditated within you a listless futile vulnerable feeling. There's a manically hostile detour with "Doubt", and then slowly the mood decends more and more into a cerebral despair - the utter melancholy of "The Drowning Man", symbolic of the whole Faith experience, spartan disjointed and spooky riffs which accompany Robert Smith's desperate "drowning" voice, blurring into the final track "Faith" where he finally declares his absolute despair. Remember this is 1981, the height of New Wave synthesizer pop - The Cure managed to perfect a balance with the new electronic sounds, not abusing it, just skilfully crafting this trademark sombre mood. There's lots of stand outs (tracks like "Other Voices", "Doubt", "Primary", etc) but I prefer to take this album as one continuous 'thing', from start to finish, the sum being more powerful for me than the parts. A masterpiece of "mood engineering".

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It hurts sometimes, June 25, 2001

By 

J.F. Quackenbush "jason_quackenbush" (SeaTac, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Faith (Audio CD)

I can't listen to this record too much because it requires a great deal from the listener, and at the wrong moments can almost be painful. Inevitably throughout the course of a listen to Faith I will get that hollow distant feeling in the pit of my stomach, that raw ache that people like Camus and Sartre were so keen on. Very few records still have that sort of impact after repeated listens, particular as many repeated listens as this ones gotten from me. The album is bleak and sparse, alternating from jagged, angular bass guitar duets like primary to the surreal synthetic and electric soundscapes of all cats are grey. It requires a listener's patience and a willingness to be taken into it's realm. The songs are long, and many of them ignore traditional song forms completely, eschewing such limiting devices as verses choruses and refrains. In my opinion this is The Cure's most fully realized work, and while their song craft has taken them in many different directions since the early eighties when this came out, when people talk about the Cure, the album that comes into my mind is their third release, Faith. It's so agonizingly gorgeous, everyone should hear it at least twice.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult to take in all at once, March 19, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Faith (Audio CD)

I picked this album and 17Seconds up on a rainy grey Saturday. I played the disk while I was doing errands around the apt. "All Cats are Grey" came on and I had to sit down. The piano at the end of that track still rings in my head. "Two pale figures ache in silence... timeless in the quiet ground... side by side in age and sadness"... Funeral Party. I had never heard anything like this before. At the time I had several Cure disks (late 80s), but I had never heard their early stuff. I ended up listening to it at least a dozen times that day. I don't think any music will ever impact me the way this disk has.....