PondaBlog

The cure was one of the first bands that I really got into. I think the first album I heard, and owned, was 1985’s the head on the door. And a doozy that one is too, with some of their top tracks and a great gothy fluorescent feel. If I remember correctly, my Mom bought it for me on a trip to Ottawa. go figure.

What made me think of the cure again was a recent pitchfork review of the reissue of 1989’s disintegration.

A 10? Really? Y’know, at the time, I loved the album, and still do. However, it ain’t perfection.

But the cure damn near reached it with an outstanding trio of albums, the ‘80s answer to bowie’s brilliant ‘70s comedown triumvirate of low, lodger and heroes, formed in the shadow of cold war berlin.

So I worked my way backwards. started with the head on the door, got sucked in, and then began discovering the earlier output.

There are hints of what’s to come on the cure’s first album, boys don’t cry (released as three imaginary boys in the UK). “Killing an Arab,” which remains one of the cure’s signature tunes, gave a nod to the outsider, albert camus’s existentialist touchstone. But the brittle pop-punk sound doesn’t really presage the claustrophopia looming on the horizon.

Up next is seventeen seconds, the first of the cure’s great trio, released in 1980. The sparse sound of boys don’t cry remains, but something else starts to seep in, a sound of confusion, a hint of dread. And they’re branching out – there’s a reverbed, gauzy effect that takes hold on seventeen seconds, a cloak that’s slowly lowering.

“I’m running towards nothing, again and again and again and again…”

Then there are the words. The line above may seem a clichéd bit of angst that would sound just as home on some emo disc. And it would. But there’s another side to them too…a glimpse of the random absurdity of existence (again, camus) and the notion of an endless, nameless return (nietzsche). to an anxious teen in Edmonton, Alberta, attending a private religious school, I suppose the lyrics tapped into some gloriously pleasurable darkness that I didn’t really have many ways to access.

Around this time I also started going to hardcore shows. And, well, I absolutely loved them. They offered a wild blast of mayhem and volume and a world I didn’t know but really wanted to. But hardcore also offered a pretty black-and-white stance, and sometimes I wanted grey.

Then I heard faith. And I got sucked in further.

The cover echoes the sound – a monochrome, blurry montage that feels like crawling through fog. Faith is austere, meditative and cold. It’s the sound of alone.

“in caves all cats are grey…”

“Primary” is the pop song, dark velvety funk. Listening to it again perfectly evokes an ‘80s sense of hip ennui (faith was released in 1981), yet if Interpol came out with it today, it would sound right. It’s dated, and it isn’t.

Faith is also a comedown album to match Bowie’s low. Grey is the perfect colour for the sleeve…it’s an interzone, strange and compelling, disconcerting yet comforting.

Any vestige of comfort was obliterated by pornography, released the following year. It boasts one of the best record sleeves ever – the figures of simon gallup, lol tolhurst and robert smith violently blurred beyond recognition, just a smear of malevolence bathed in overpowering blood red. It’s a mushroom trip gone horribly, vividly wrong. and make no mistake, this is a bad-trip album – and so it’s not too surprising, then, that stories abound about the cure descending into their own drugged-out dead ends whilst making pornography. Rarely has a cover been so indicative of the content.

And the title. perfect. A single word, dirty, filthy, illicit, an apt cipher of the sounds lurking in the grooves.

“it doesn’t matter if we all die…”

The first line of the first song on the first side pretty much sums it up. Again, just reading it, it comes across as impossibly trite, almost comic. But it’s backed up by a swirling maelstrom that makes the words hit so much harder and deeper. Pornography, after all, is the cure’s black masterpiece. it doesn’t matter if we all die, and smith means it.

the sound is HUGE on pornography, a precursor to the white light-heat-noise effect that was a signature of some of those lumped into the shoegaze scene – most notably my bloody valentine (there’s an aesthetic echo between the sleeves of pornography and mbv’s loveless), but also ride.

Smith had been bleak before, but on pornography he’s brutal. His voice has never sounded so twisted, wretched – sometimes howling, other times not so much bored by existence as hollowed out by it.

“is it always like this?” (again, nietszche’s eternal return…)

The final two tracks are stunning, in both senses of the word. “cold” is overpowering, a machine death dirge paired with frozen synths and a gorgeous, glowing guitar motif that engulfs everything. “your name like ice, into my heart.”

“pornography” is the end game, the final plunge into the abyss. It begins with the absurd, the insane – backward tape loops that haunt the edges of the entire track and then re-emerge as the final fucked-up farewell. The guitar is serrated, ugly, backed by tribal beats and a punishing drone arpeggio. Smith is angry and broken and desperate: “Another day like today and I’ll kill you…”

The rage ebbs, ambient noise engulfed by machine babble. madness.

“I must fight this sickness…find a cure…”

And well, the cure did find a cure. Or they found some sort of different direction. They decided to come up for some air and a bit of sunshine – or, at least, a moderately overcast climate. They had to, really – had the cure continued their current demonic descent (when does one really hit rock bottom?) they could have well beaten venom to the black metal punch.

The top, the next album, entered newish territory, still weird and dark…and yet lighter and, well, poppier (“caterpillar girl”). This pattern was perfected with the head on the door, followed by the sprawling psychedelia that defined the gorgeous double album kiss me kiss me kiss me.

And so, the circle works it way forward to disintegration – another gloom masterpiece. Yet here, smith is older, and he sounds, well, resigned – not fucking terrifying, like he does on pornography.

I’ve pretty much lost touch with the cure…the latest album I have is wish, which came out eons ago. Perhaps I should check out their newer offerings. I’ve a feeling that I’ll be disappointed though – not necessarily because of the music (although that might be the case), but simply because I don’t think they could hit me at this point in the same way that they did those many years ago.

But this isn’t just about nostalgia. I hadn’t dug out and listened to the cure’s defining trilogy in ages. Now, re-listening, those records remain utterly captivating, a great gloomy troika, lyrics emanating from my mouth that I hadn’t uttered in ages, like I’m speaking in tongues. Possessed, still.

RIP Bill Dixon.

a sad commentary on the times, indeed.

an ace piece on a lucky fellow (well, perhaps not so lucky…) who owns the greatest record collection in the world. plus, the dude is from pittsburgh – home of my beloved Steelers!

sports jingoism aside, this video raises all sorts of troubling questions. the collection’s estimated to be worth $50 million…and he’s asking for a mere $3 million (by the way, if anyone wants to send me the asking price, please feel free…tell you what, all you need to do is send me $2,995,000, and i’ll kick in the remainder).

despite Paul Mawhinney’s astounding collection, so far, there have been no takers. it’s like he says…no one gives a damn.

it’s a scathing indictment of these virtual times, when everything is accessible with the click of a mouse or the touch of an iPad screen. the consummate pleasures of digging for treasures amongst crates of vinyl, or even CDs, is fast becoming an anachronism. and in the process, whole eras are simply disappearing. as he says, more than 80 per cent of his collection that dates from 1948 to 1966 aren’t even available on CD. whole histories are being vaporized. and are we the poorer for it? absolutely.

really, it’s a commentary on late-stage capitalism, a phenomenon where all that matters is acceleration. what’s left behind is detritus, whole eras forgotten, discarded to the dustbin of the past. history just doesn’t matter anymore, and music has become pure commodity.

don’t get me wrong…i’m not a luddite, and technology has made an incredible amount of music available to me personally that i never would have been able to find otherwise. my love of electronic music is based on hardware and software that keeps evolving incessantly. and every week – actually, nearly every day – i manage to get turned on to all sorts of sounds via downloadable mixes and the like – that i never would have been able to find by myself.

but there’s also an essential spirit that’s being lost in this endless rush for ease and accessibility. no one has to actually try anymore. and the pure pleasure of the fetishism of the object – and let’s face it, so much of collecting has to do with this fetishism – is rapidly disappearing. vinyl records, and even CDs, on a smaller scale, are not just objects to listen to. they are (well, at least some of the time) artworks in their own right. they are physical, visual entities – entities that can be held and examined and read and observed in a way that no MP3 download can replicate. they engage us, and we engage them.

our whole way of listening is changing as well. with vinyl records in particular, one typically listens to a full side of one record, then flips it over and listens to the other side. yes, tracks can be skipped, but the action required to do so is laborious. it’s simpler, and often more pleasurable, to listen to the record in its entirety.

this process was radically altered with CDs, which allowed listeners to simply fast forward to whatever track they wanted to hear. and yes, i have done this countless times myself. but still, one is presented with a single object that can be played from beginning to end, amen.

today, listeners don’t have to bother with such constituent and bothersome units. they can download whatever track they want from a particular release and forget the rest. instant gratification, no personal investment required.

in 1982, Walter Ong wrote a fascinating treatise entitled Orality and Literacy, which examined the shift from oral societies to the culture of the written word. we’re now well into the next stage…moving into some post-physical aether where ease is everything and the difficult yet consummate pleasures of existence – what we used to know and experience as the human condition – are being consigned to the ontological sidelines.

things keep changing.

and after all this, i like the fact that Mawhinney’s most valuable record is from the Rolling Stones.

Cannonball from California is a place. on Vimeo.

the best of times, the worst of times. a fascinating and beautifully filmed piece on the economic meltdown in california, where endless abandoned abodes have led to a nirvana for skaters hungry for pools and concrete coping. it’s the end game of capitalism…everyone thought they could have everything, then it all fell apart. now cali is considering legalizing pot to garner desperately needed revenues. perhaps the downturn has some upturns. the end of history, indeed…

is FACT the greatest mag/site of the moment? their podcasts alone make me say a big phat yes. first up is seattle’s the sight below, who provides a lovely shoegazy mix (note the mbv t-shirt) that starts off with the perenially underrated slowdive. sure, there are  a few odd choices along the way (iggy’s “nightclubbing?” really?) but any session that ends with clan of xymox is a winner in my book.

then there are the other goodies - mixes courtesy of berlin’s techno auteur marcel dettmann and dub occultists demdike stare. and i’ve just seen that the latest mix is from ariel pink’s haunted graffiti. go on, take me i’m yours (apologies to David Gedge)…

not a bad week for releases, then. first, nearly four decades after its coked-out blues buzz crawled out of a basement in villa nellcôte, perhaps the greatest rock ‘n’ roll record ever in the history of the universe gets reissued. plus, there’re 10 bonus tracks that purists are griping over (see the comments section in the article) but whatevs – i’m salivating over this one. i want gram parson’s spoon though!

i was wondering how pitchfork would rate exile (yes, these thoughts actually occur to me…). lo and behold, they’ve given it the good ol’ 10-spot. but don’t let that scare you off.

then there’s mr. James Murphy, pictured above, who just happened to put out two of the past decade’s best discs. now, his third offering as lcd soundsystem – this is happening – is out and once again, it’s getting rave reviews.

the pitchfork review quotes a curious line from murphy: “I spent my whole life wanting to be cool… but I’ve come to realize that coolness doesn’t exist the way I once assumed.”

now normally, if someone told me they’d spent their whole life wanting to be cool, i’d probably run for the hills. and really, lcd’s pop-culture mining cachet and knowing winks make me almost want to not like the band. but i simply can’t argue with the output – two stunningly good albums, and hopefully another one to complete the triumvirate.

now where’s that new mbv album?

came across this ace video whilst reading in the ny times about the pending demise of the brooklyn banks, a legendary street skating spot.  included is some classic footage from powell peralta’s future primitive video. and it’s great to see Vallely reminisce about the banks, skateboarding in the ’80s and his early days. i remember Vallely coming on the scene when i was a teen – about 18 centuries ago – and just blowing me away with his stylish, aggressive, avant-garde moves. it’s like he says…back then, stuff was happening so quickly, especially in terms of street skating, that it was hard to keep track of who was pulling which sick new trick. it’s cool to see him now too – older but no less passionate about his calling.

great skate spots are sacred places. and now another sacred place is gonna be gone. what a shame.