“Pictures Of You”
The Cure
Disintegration
1989, Elektra
The Drive: On most drum and vocal tracks recorded in the 1980’s, gratuitous reverb and overt echo effects in tandem with layers of keyboards cause this musical era to seem to me to be, well, funny. When I hear these studio treatments, it immediately calls to mind the Girls Just Wanna Have Funs, the Walk Like An Egyptians, and the Tarzan Boys, which tend to blot out the memory of any actual timeless beauty created by brooding songwriters during that decade. The invite to take an album like Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love from 1987 seriously, for example, prompts snickers. I’ve come to forgive the production on that album, but if it were to be stripped away it would be abundantly clear that Springsteen delivered an album nearly as perfect as Nebraska that year. There are, of course, actual mainstream pop masterpieces from the 1980’s whose production you wouldn’t want to strip away, and whose poetic success, mystery, and self-realization relies heavily upon it, and at no time have seemed funny at all: Paul Simon’s Graceland, Prince’s Purple Rain, and Dire Strait’s Brothers In Arms a few obvious examples. The Cure’s Disintegration is another, and at least one of the few hundred best of all time. Lyrically and sonically, the record is a masterpiece, and when I remember that all of it is actually written by a man with a name as plain as Robert Smith and is being performed by human beings with real instruments and fingers, it becomes that much more astounding, beautiful, and mesmerizing.
