Customer Reviews

Pornography

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There is no question in my mind that Robert Smith's head was in the lowest pit of hell when he wrote this album. The music is filled with anger, hate, sorrow, fear, rage, and despair; all pieces of the darker parts of the human psyche. The listener is taken on a gothic roller-coaster ride through dementia starting with the line "It doesn't matter if we all die" all the way to the vampiric conclusion "I must fight this sickness". Such emotion in this album, and you can't pull away from listening to it. There is something about the way the music is constructed and performed that keeps your ears alert and numbs your mind to the pain that is being expressed. You find yourself understanding the agony of the performers.

This record was way ahead of its time and, until 1989's "Disintigration", was The Cure's greatest achievement in the studio. Every song is great and they flow from one to the next in a perfect order. This album is flawless; a magically written, masterfully performed accomplishment in music.

This, along with Disintegration, are my favorite Cure albums. I have only a handful of their work, but this one sticks out more than anyone, because of its relentless, overwhelming sense of despair. It is reminiscent of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, Skip Spence's Oar, and Nick Drake's Pink Moon in terms of hearing a soul in torment and a band in deepest depair.

Robert Smith was extremely depressed and doing a ton of drugs when he made this album, and his misery bleeds through every groove. The opener, One Hundred Years, set the tone with "it doesn't matter if we all die", and it sails the seas of blood from there. I really like the songs One Hundred Years, The Hanging Garden (the cheeriest song on the album, which isn't saying much, and not suprisingly, the album's only single), and the title track, which is a great closer. Smith's vocals are especially strong on this one, showing much more emotion than he usually does. I've always found his voice rather flat, but here his despair makes him sing better than he usually does.

The album sounds like a lot of Public Image Limited's early work. The sound is coarse, cacophonous, and edgy, and it really, really works. If I had to take two Cure albums to an island, I would take this one and Disintegration.

It's a shame in a way that nowadays this album seems to fit in with a vast amount of similarly aggressive and agonising music. On it's release it was the first of it's kind and to describe its impact as harrowing would be a serious understatement.

Seminal it undoubtably was but where other bands strive to achieve the same effect they fail because 'Pornography' is so sincere. Only Nirvana reached the level of outright desperation that brutally stabs out of this recording. But cacophony in itself is not enough. These are really great songs produced by a man who was driving himself way too hard.

In amongst the relentlessly attacking sound, evidence of a great songwriter emerges in moments of astonishing beauty. This is why the Cure's more recent releases fail. Smith was still discovering his ability and wrote as a man in some kind of genuine purgatory. Now, he's wealthy and comfortable and no matter how hard he digs, the well of desparate memories and wondrous revelations have run dry.

So considering it's utterly uncompromising sound it's not surprising that this shocking album didn't sell on release. It left people either stunned (like watching someone having a nervous breakdown at a party) or alienated, after all, it's predecessors were low key and fanciful in comparison.

It marked a change in Smith's life. Although the following album had it's moments of crushing beauty he moved firmly into the land of the 'Lovecats', commercial success and some kind of weird happiness. And unlike Kurt Cobain there really was a happy ending.

PORNOGRAPHY is the culmination of the Cure's first descent into the abyss both musically and in what the band were experiencing on a personal level. It's one of the best goth-rock albums of all time - dark, foreboding, eerie and depressing yet strangely beautiful. The drum sound is tribal and bass heavy, the guitars range from moody to disturbingly hallucinatory and the lyrics are bleak and cryptic. In my old tour book from the KISS ME tour, Cure mastermind Robert Smith reveals that while he can appreciate eroticism, he abhors pornography. In this light, pornography is miserable and ugly, thus a fitting title for the album.

BREAKDOWN:

"One Hundred Years" - Casting an apocalyptic shadow of impending doom and destruction, the opening track is super-intense - "Over and over we die one after the other." *****

"A Short Term Effect" - A weird, gloomy track with strange guitar effects, vocal manipulations and a wavering beat. *****

"The Hanging Garden" - With relentless, pounding bass and drums and spiraling guitars, this is a gorgeously gloomy song and worthy single. *****

"Siamese Twins" - a slower song, beautifully morbid and full of loathing. *****

"The Figurehead" - A bleak, depressing song of fear and isolation with a merciless military drum beat. *****

"A Strange Day" - offers a lone ray of hope through the murky desolation of PORNOGRAPHY via escapism. One of the few Cure songs to feature a guitar solo without any other instruments - the segment is intended to represent being instantly hit with the memory of a song. Beautiful. *****

"Cold" - An absolutely dreary song with icy keyboards and brutal, lethargic drums. *****

"Pornography" - Sounding like a horrifying torture chamber scene, the final track is a whirlwind of creepy sounds. The muddled voices at the beginning and end of the track are especially freaky. The final line - "I must fight this sickness / Find a cure." *****

this is one of the best cure cds! the reissue sounds great! totally does it justice. highly recommended for all cure fans!!