Another day, grinding to a halt..Cold, purple and blue pink secrets, the pornography of a strange day..Just like heaven in a dream, my ears beheld the magick of the notes that came raining down upon me, like a chain of flowers from the upstairs room - give me it, just one kiss is all I want..How beautiful you are, like snow in summer and icing sugar..You sneezed, and I had to say it over..Walking down fascination street, I hear blue and purple notes swirling, falling, making pictures of you invade my thoughts..Not even the loudest sound is more than this..

The Cure..Surely this is the best band in the world..No one revels in the sumptuous pleasures of melancholy like Robert Smith..Robert's words are capable of laying out any heart, no matter how blackened or hardened by pain..And he is very good at drawing you in so you can experience his as well..I am sitting here listening to the songs, and allowing the music to wash over me and clear out all the rubbish from the long days..The music and the lyrics, though they uplift me, also sadden me, because here is another human with a heart as big and wide open as the world, and the lyrics speak of longing, of pain and emptiness..And of the desire to be overwhelmed by love..Why is it so hard for some to be open and receptive, and for others, it seems so easy, so natural? What is it about love that, on one hand, makes people want it more than anything, and on the other, scares them to death? So the first song I play is "Trust"..Something we all desire, and something we want from others as well..But in this song, I believe Robert is saying that he has no one else in the world to turn to, but one..If that one should go away, life would be more than empty..It would be unbearable..But this song has a double standard, for the person its written about has known the bitterness of loss, and of having trusted, only to find that trust betrayed..And now it is the hardest thing to be able to do..

"There is no-one left in the world
That I can hold onto
There is really no-one left at all
There is only you

And if you leave me now
You leave all that we were
Undone
There is really no-one left
You are the only one

And still the hardest part for you
To put your trust in me
I love you more than I can say
Why won't you just believe?"

So easy to say, but so hard to believe..Trust is critical in any relationship..Without trust, things stagnate and there is no room for growth..Even the piano in this song puts forth the loneliness and emptiness..The desperation, the need to be accepted..Can you feel what I am describing? Are your empathic abilities finely - tuned enough to be able to take this in? Is your heart beginning to break with the heaviness of this song? Keeping with the fluid motion, I put on the next song..This one is simply called " Cut ", but for all its simplicity in a title, the words are anything but, and the feelings embedded within the words are far more complex..

" If only you'd never look at me
The way that you do
If only you'd never look like that
When I look at you

I see face like stone
Eyes of ice
Mouth so sweetly telling lies

I wish you felt the way that I still do
The way that I still do..

But you don't
You don't feel anymore
You don't care anymore
It's all gone "..

What does it feel like when you reach out to a brick wall? Impenetrable? How can another human be compared to that wall? Do we not feel? Do we not desire? Do we not love? How then can we be impenetrable? How can we look upon one we have loved with hatred? Or lie to the one we shared time with? How does love simply go away? Was it really love if it did? So many questions, yet few are the answers..It is like having stood too long in the sun, that it has bleached all the color from life..Songs like this make me wonder just how close those who do not suffer from vampirism, actually come to suffering from it..The brick wall he came up against in this song, is quite clearly a shield, and one very cleverly put together..I wonder if some mundanes know how close they are to us in some respects..

Etched into the mind's eye is a place not quite tangible, yet spinning with the colors of life...Walking under the dry of the desert sun, casting about for a reprieve. There is great stone building rising from the landscape as if discarded by a passing god. Approaching the portal, gapes a still, yet grasping maw. Step inside where the cool air relieves so much from the heat that it nearly distracts from the lush greenery abounding every where. This new place is cast in a fabricated blanket of night, striding inward the cool air eddies about and the music is enveloping.. Like eyes rising from the depths, the music builds interweaving, like the flight of some strange mythic creature. Forming an ethereal spiral stair up which I dash moving rapidly as the stair fades to nothingness behind me.. And so I play the song "Want"..

"I want the sky to fall in
I want lighting and thunder,
I want blood instead of rain,
I want the world to make me wonder"

The lightning flashes, drawing my eyes from the inscription. Embracing the storm, I ask aloud who has not felt as Robert did? Guzzling down life but forgetting to savor the taste.

In this next song, it seems to me that maybe the guys in The Cure decided to do something a little more light-hearted when they wrote " Lullaby "..Makes you wonder where Robert's head was when he wrote this, and what he might have been thinking about..Maybe he just saw the new Spiderman flick? Nahh, can't be that.. This tune is a bit older..Maybe he was reading the comic..Or maybe he was thinking what it would be like to have fangs sinking in him and draining away his resolve..Removing all the cares from him..Or maybe it doesn't mean a damn thing and this is just a kooky tune to escape reality for awhile..

"On candystripe legs the spiderman comes
Softly through the shadow of the evening sun
Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead
Looking for the victim shivering in bed

Searching out fear in the gathering gloom and
Suddenly!

A movement in the corner of the room!
And there is nothing I can do
When I realise with fright
That the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight!" ..

It's kinda kewl when you can step outside and away from the serious stuff for awhile and just let yourself go..And stepping outside himself is just what Robert has done in the next song..Ever had one of those experiences where, you are in your body, but you seem to be outside yourself, almost as though you are next to yourself and watching what you're doing? This is what is being described in this song.. It's almost as if here you have a rational person, which is himself, watching someone who is no longer functioning as himself, though it is himself he is watching.. Kinda hard to describe really..

"I've been watching me fall for it seems like years
watching me grow small, I watch me disappear
slipping out my ordinary world, out my ordinary eyes,
yeah slipping out the ordinary me into someone else's life -
into someone else's life "...

Here he describes what I was trying to say above.. Almost he is analysing himself through his own eyes, although he is seeing himself as though he is a stranger looking upon himself..In this song, he has been wandering all day, no partiocular goal in mind, nowhere in particular to go - just out..To get away for awhile, and then a woman approaches him and offers herself as company, which he accepts, and for awhile, he escapes from himself and the rest of the world..

"yeah it's a cruel mean cold new day, and outside the snow is still coming down..
and in the blood red Tokyo bed I watch me coming round..
she pulled him down for hours, deeper than I've ever been..
and as I fall in the mirror on the wall, I'm watching me scream..
I'M WATCHING ME SCREAM
I'M WATCHING ME SCREAM"..

Well, I do believe this part is self - explanatory, but I will anyway..Basically, Robert is wandering around Tokyo.. He has no particular destination in mind - He just wants an escape..His meanderings lead him to a japanese whore who invites him inside and basically helps him relieve his mind and everything else as well..And what he has done in the song, is written it as though some part of him has stepped to one side and is observing what Robert the man is doing, so he goes on to describe how this woman takes him "deeper than he has ever gone before", which tells me they probably got up to some fairly kinky business, and then he wakes up the next morning, looks in the mirror, and sees the wreck his life has become, and it unmans him..He seems to be sad that this part of him is disappearing, and he doesn't know how to catch himself, so he continues to fall - while he stands there and watches..

Next, I play "This is a lie"..The slow waltz of emotion begins.. Two spheres of feeling orbiting each other, drawing toward their inevitable collision..

"Why each of us decides
I've never been sure,
the part we play the way we are,
why each of us denies every other way in the world"..

Voice raised in relentless searching, Robert lets me understand the name of this group as he seeks the cure for his feelings of pointlessness in the face of cavitations arbitrary acts.. Stretching out his hands to the cosmos he questions.. Why must each of us lose everyone else in the world..?

Often I’ve spoken to people who strive to force 'rational' upon love...Concocting lists, fantasies, and requirements...In what is ultimately a quest for artificial perfection.. I wish every one of them would bathe in this song for a while and let it remind them of how poignant and strange life really is..This next song is called "Strange attraction"..

"Strange attraction spreads it's wings
it varies but the smallest things
you never know how anything will change.
Strange attraction spreads it's wings
it alters but the smallest things
and you never know how anything will fade.."

The curious enigma of beguiling romance is one of the highest forces, and where these strange attractions are concerned, Robert is right, you never know..

Finally, the last song on my set is one which is one of my very favorite Cure songs..This song, more than the rest, is one of those songs where, you wish, if this is a dream, you never wake up from again..Just to step " Out of this world " and stay there for a time with the one you love..

"When we look back on it all as I know we will,
you and me, wide eyed
I wonder...
will we really remember how it feels to be this alive?
and I know we have to go, I realise
we only get to stay so long
always have to go back to real lives
where we belong
where we belong
where we belong.."

Why do we have to go back to real life? Isn't being with someone you love, who makes you feel good, and happy, and joyful, isn't that part of real life too?

"But real lives are the reason why
we want to live another life
we want to feel another time
another time...
yeah another time.."

Real life makes us appreciate these times I suppose..But the thing is, who actually gets to have real times like this when people are too busy shielding? When they are brick walls, impenetrable? Why does it all have to be so black and white? Why not allow ourselves to open up and bring color back to our lives? "One last time before it's over, one last time before the end, one last time before it's time to go again"..Listening and writing, I have to say has caused me to become both moody and thoughtful..There is only brief, fleeting happiness in some of these songs, and the emptiness is apparent..Still, where the lyrics say one thing, the music speaks its own language and The Cure music is uplifting, or some of us wouldn't bother listening to it..For those of you who are interested, I have included a couple of links for you, one is to the official "The Cure" site, so that those of you who wish, can learn more about the band, and also a link so you can check out their music..

The Official The Cure site is here

And I know how you all love listening to music, so here is a link that'll take you straight to the " bloodflowers " album where some of these songs came from..

Click here to listen to The Cure

And so we come to the end of this review, in the hopes that you have enjoyed it again, and that it opened some doors musically for you..Until next month..

Dark Blessings~

GrayAngel & Silver

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