Tonight’s selections from the Cure’s seventh album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. This was released 35 years ago!
In the first half of the '80s, the Cure (particularly Robert Smith) was the face of alternative music. Pale skin, black eyeliner and blood red lips became the uniform of those who deemed themselves outside of the mainstream, and the Cure? The Cure was the cool band people would say they listened to when they wanted to prove that they themselves were cool. The Head on the Door made the Cure Masters of the Form and expanded this rather myopic opinion of the band. The Head on the Door had been a visceral musical masterpiece that channeled the Cure's musical energies in an album length wave of accessible energy. It eliminated the idea that the Cure was nothing more than the face of alternative music. The Cure had openly courted the mainstream without ever actually swimming in it or changing the basics of their sound. In essence, the Cure didn't seem to care about being cool at all and, naturally this made the band that much cooler. They were no longer simply what alternative music looked like; they were what it sounded like as well.
After The Head on the Door, the band found themselves tasked with following up the most successful production of their musical ideas. So in 1987 The Cure released Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me a sprawling double album filled with virtually every musical idea that Robert Smith and the band could think of. With the release of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me the band that had always seemed too cool for the mainstream, the band that had always been seen as the cool alternative to it, discovered something they'd never experienced before – their first world wide success.
No ideas are better executed than "Why Can't I Be You" and "Just Like Heaven". Two twins of pop perfection, they are both perverse love songs – horny and obsessed with a partner that the singer is willing to sacrifice everything for. In "Why Can't I Be You" the singer is so filled with desire for his lover that he wishes, over a barrage of infectious horns as biting and hungry as he is, to simply be her. The singer of "Just Like Heaven" longs for a lost love, one drowned within the tempest of his own passion, that he used to spend all of his time trying to make glow. "Just Like Heaven" is a storm of emotion, a complete relationship lived and lost in the span of three and a half minutes that proves how amazing a musical unit The Cure can be. It's the type of great musical moment that makes Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me the great album that it is. — Pop Matters
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Just Like Heaven [1987]
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It all comes back to 'Just Like Heaven' in the end. It's the one that seemingly everyone knows thanks to any number of covers and live remakes and 80s retro radio and more. It really has easily and simply become a real pop classic, almost certainly the one song that everyone probably knows by The Cure to this day. It's three and a half minutes of brilliance where absolutely nothing is wasted and everything is necessary.
In many ways, it summarizes this kaleidoscopic album as well. Smith not taking a vocal straight from the start? Check. [Boris] Williams kicking it off instead with a great drum fill, one which Smith says inspired him to do that lovely instrument-by-instrument build of the opening arrangement? Check. The way said build, again, instantly showcases to anyone who'd care to listen that there's a tight ensemble fully at work here, whether it's [Simon] Gallup's bassline, [Porl] Thompson's backing guitar, whoever it was that played that couldn't-be-any-better descending keyboard line, Smith's own exuberant and now near trademark guitar part in turn? Check. A killer, immediately attention grabbing opening line? Show me show me show me indeed.
I very suddenly, quite literally as I'm typing this final paragraph, remembered a moment the following year after I first heard 'Just Like Heaven', at my high school graduation party, dancing to this song, and a couple of more tangled memories with that. Maybe it was always meant to be a kind of anthem for any number of moments like that, where bliss and melancholy wrapped together tight, all with really good music to underscore it and set the tone. I guess I was just lucky enough to get that moment, at least, when it first hit. Susan's still a friend and agrees she might have been a bit hasty - 'Boys Don't Cry' is still her favourite - but if 'Just Like Heaven' was a sellout, teenage me didn't know the difference, and adult me is glad it was. It, like the band, like the album it came from, is one truly singular prospect, and I couldn't wish it to be any other way. — The Quietus
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Why Can't I Be You [1987]
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Every major mode of the Cure is here, and sounding better than ever, each one a realm of its own. There's grand, tormented wailing ("The Kiss", "Fight") next to tender, sunny numbers ("Catch"). There are creepy-crawly Orientalist nightmares ("The Snake Pit", "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep") and slow, sparkling romances ("One More Time"). There are bitter shouts ("Shiver and Shake"), all-pop numbers ("Just Like Heaven"), and complex intersections between the two ("Hot Hot Hot", "Why Can't I Be You?"). Smith's lyrics even find, among the usual animals and anguish, a set of linchpin images that reflect in each of those directions. There is a mouth on the cover, and the songs are full of devouring-- both the devouring mouths of desire and the fear of being consumed. Christmas gets to evoke both gaudy colors and sad nostalgia. There's the deep, dark water that would soon be all over Disintegration, and there's an endless romantic push and pull: someone so perfect that Smith asks "Why can't I be you?" and someone else so perfect that Smith asks, "You want to know why I hate you?" Some of these songs play out mixed-up emotions-- weird crossovers of depression and joy, love and loathing, anger and resignation-- that we barely have names for. Bitter torture and giddy excitement and desire, desire, desire: They all come together into one almost maniacally impassioned thing.
This is the world of the raccoon-eyed, mumbling, moping, endlessly sensitive late-80s Cure fan in one gorgeous, totally immersive package, and it's one of the most convincing, emotionally whole, and individual albums of the decade-- an entire imagined land, complete with sounds, visions, and styles, huge on romance and drama. If you were only ever to buy one Cure album, most people would point you to that landmark Disintegration, and there's every chance you'd be amazed by it. But for the whole breadth of the Cure-- and what seems like the whole head of Smith-- in one glorious package, this is the one that matters. — Pitchfork
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Hot Hot Hot!!! [1987]
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I want a boy that's dark but still like icing sugar. I want to be in love like love is here. I want cars that drive me away and motorbikes that never come back. Just to feel my heart for a second. And those keyboards, the deep synth inside me, driving on long roads hoping something might change. My girlfriends and I rolling through semi-rural wastelands with The Cure in the deck, windows down, howling into the wind. But no one ever kissed my neck quite like I wanted them to, like Robert said they would, like the sad refrains promised.
Listening to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me now makes me want to write my resignation letter. Like I forgot to be something the songs promised or something I'd promised myself. To live inside a poem. Back when those chords soared through me like lightening and I might have had the guts. An album that got into my skin, that's still curling around in there somewhere like the filigree traces of LSD.
Now I'm dreaming of running away to Nicaragua to disappear somewhere where the routines and the administration can't get me. I wonder where Robert and the rest of The Cure might be but then I want to remain naive. I want them to stay just as I remembered them when I was a teenager and I wonder if they ever think of us. All those 80s kids they damaged so perfectly. Running to their hearts to be near. — The Conversation
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If Only Tonight We Could Sleep [Live 2002]
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Simon Cowell, Ralph Macchio
Jimmy Fallon: Blake Shelton, Gigi Hadid
Stephen Colbert: Ryan Reynolds, Rob McElhenney, James Taylor
Seth Meyers: Gwen Stefani, Grant Morrison, Raghav Mehrotra
James Corden: Kris Jenner, Kylie Jenner, Jeff Scheen
The Daily Show: Marty Walsh
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
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Dinosaur Jr with a guitar driven cover of Just Like Heaven.
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Dinosaur Jr :: Just Like Heaven [1989]
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