The Cure: The Head on the Door poll

"Throw Your Foot"!

"Throw Your Foot" is excellent!!!

IT WOULD BE SO PERFECT!!! IF YOU WOULD JUST FALL OUT THE WINDOW!!!

always been a big fan of that track.

A Man Inside My Mouth is in my top twenty Cure songs ever, maybe top 12

did they ever get around to putting out 'Orange' on DVD? I don't think they did, did they?

nope

I didn't think so. It's a bit of a shame, really, because it's one of my favourite concert films. I definitely prefer it to 'Trilogy' (I only tend to watch one album at a time on that DVD, rather than the full thing - and it's usually the 'Pornography' set I choose to watch).

none of their VHS releases have made it to DVD AFAIK. and the Greatest Hits DVD is pointless bcz a) incomplete and iirc b) shoddily mastered and c) taken from masters for the VHSes, so some clips end in a second or two of transition pieces from Staring At The Sea

Robert also recently said that some Paris film from a few years ago (ie not "Paris") that no-one's ever heard of before will come out before the Reflections DVD that MY TAXES DAMMIT paid for...

STRIKE ME
STRIKE ME
STRIKE ME DEEE-ADDD

except "Six Different Ways" every song is amazing

You misspelled "Push"

I love every song on this album. If I had to make a choice or do a TS between this and Disintegration, this album would win.

Push isn't so much a song but one little idea, but it's effective imo xp

"push" is my favorite thing here easy

"we have this great riff, why do anything else to it"

right. full disclosure as I was clicking this thread I was thinking "Dan and his GD 'Push' aversion" lol

"we have this great riff, why do anything else to it"

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson),

I muttered this in a mail earlier this week regarding an article pitch about this album:

...this is more than just 'another great Cure album,' it's also a strangely unique one. Consider: it's their last 'short' album ever, their last one designed for a single slab of vinyl or cassette (everything else after that either doubles or is more and more aimed at the CD age and beyond -- they have NEVER had an album shorter than an hour since, much less forty minutes). And within that they have a crazy range, something that had been clearly going on The Top but given that was a glorified solo project, this feels more like a *band* stretching out, the more so because it is for a lot of folks the start of a classic lineup, though Smith gets the sole songwriter credit throughout. All the poppy singles in the previous two years build up to bigger pop moments, the deep cuts often sound richer, the harrowing extremes more harrowing, and it's still a slim ten-song punch. It deserves a lot more attention for itself, even with the profile it already has.

I read that Smith treated this album as if he were a composer giving material to a band instead of a functioning band recording and writing together (which KKK and Disintegration were).

although it's my understanding that Smith really does write most of the music and just plays fair with composing credits.

I love The Head on the Door dearly but the idea that there are ANY harrowing extremes on it makes me giggle.

Anyway, because of its brevity the band's penchant for repeating a motif without variation for several bars is more charming and effective than it ever will be again. Like Ned said, every song is a discrete entity, signaling directions for albums the band could have pursued.

I love The Head on the Door dearly but the idea that there are ANY harrowing extremes on it makes me giggle.

Tsk sir. (Nothing may have the cumulative impact of, say, Pornography itself, but "The Baby Screams" and "Sinking" do exist, and the fact that the album ends with "Sinking" always stuck out at me. It was almost like "Fight" two years later was a necessary corrective.)

didn't they do "The Blood" on Unplugged in '90? That impressed me.

Everything on this album rather emphatically sounds like a pop song, I believe on purpose. There are points where the lyrics go out there but even then, Robert spends more time singing them rather than the extremes he goes through on The Top or on KM^3.

Would have voted "Inbetween Days" but "Six Different Ways" is a close second.

In fact, it's that unrelenting pop sensibility that connects all of these disparate songs and makes them work so well together as an album; even though everything sounds different, there is a baseline accessibility that connects everything together.

yeah it's basically Smith's pop album, hence its brevity. If you'd followed the band till this point you could see the clouds parting as those drums roll heralding "Inbetween Days."

xposts -- A fair take! But I think it's also a way of how allowing the disparate songs musically and lyrically etc. to exist next to each other (and again, not totally unprecedented, thus The Top etc.) gives them greater gravity that might otherwise have existed. My terminology/emphasis may be out of place a bit but it functions still. In this regard the difference between this and Kiss Me lies in the concision.

also: "We have money."

Record company dosh? You're soaking in it!

It's bugging me a bit, I'm trying to find a quote -- I want to say it was either Nabisco (OTM) or Douglas Wolk in one of their reissue reviews, but I'm not seeing it in a quick search -- about how when the Cure turned away from a truly playful sense of pop experimentation that describes 82 to 87, there was a phase that ended and never really returned. One thing I remember about the last album is how when "Freakshow" came out as a single there was a sense of "hey where has THIS Cure been for all this time?"

i know ppl hate this movie but it had a few amazing bits in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCVH_rc6u6s

is it a mistake i wonder when he goes "this.. this is.. " i always thought it might be.

xp: Theresa Wayman from Warpaint at 2:38.

when the Cure turned away from a truly playful sense of pop experimentation that describes 82 to 87, there was a phase that ended and never really returned. One thing I remember about the last album is how when "Freakshow" came out as a single there was a sense of "hey where has THIS Cure been for all this time?"

Yeah this is very much OTM - the main reason for the decline of the band post-Disintegration has been their loss of spontaneity, RS spending his time trying to second-guessing his audience. All the wacky pop singles since have seemed mostly fake and contrived compared to the unpredictability of their stuff 82-87

Unreserved love for this entire album excepting "Screw" is a touch pointless ... and "Push" is actually Blondie's "Union City Blues", once heard the similarity cannot be unheard.
But yeah, "The Baby Screams" is probably the perfection of everything The Top was aiming for, the singles are untouchable, and I had a little "moment" in 2013 when I finally visited Kyoto and played THAT SONG (which is also untouchable).

Yeah this is very much OTM - the main reason for the decline of the band post-Disintegration has been their loss of spontaneity, RS spending his time trying to second-guessing his audience. All the wacky pop singles since have seemed mostly fake and contrived compared to the unpredictability of their stuff 82-87

It could be argued, now that I think about it, that part of RS's own particular impulses on this front have been channelled into the stream of one-offs, dance collaborations, etc. that has been happening constantly. Not all of them by any means

It took me years but I finally picked up the Deluxe Edition reissue of Head on the Door recently (KMKMKM too), listening to the album again for the first time in quite a while confirmed for me that it's my least favourite of their 80s releases. It doesn't hang together as an album for me in the same way that the 1980-1984 records do, the sequencing feels kind of haphazard. The bad bits: Push (which I've never been able to stand - "depthlessly saccharine" as someone described it above perfectly), A Night Like This (possibly my least favourite Cure single) and I like both Screw and The Baby Screams but they feel kind of...unfinished, as though the genesis of a great idea was there that didn't quite reach fruition. That said, I think Six Different Ways, The Blood, Kyoto Song and Sinking are all absolute top-shelf Cure and the album version of Close To Me is really great. I think I like Stop Dead, The Exploding Boy and Man Inside My Mouth more than I do about half of the songs that made the album.

Onto KMKMKM!

The extras on The Head On the Door are fantastic.

Kiss Me... not as much.

yeah 100% agree with Birds in Hell. It's OK but always seemed a bit throwaway. 30 years later, it's the b-sides that I keep coming back to.

but, but, INBETWEEN DAYS!
There is a fair bit of rubbish though - Birds in Hell OTM for most tracks.

Shit, just saw my January post of unreserved love. Clearly 2015 has done a number on me.

This is one of their best ever albums.

This is where they started getting a bit duller (it is still quite good)

It's the last proper studio album in what I personally see as The Cure's "golden age" which began on their first album and ended with the release of the Standing On A Beach compilation. Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration and Wish were/are all incredibly popular records, and there's some great music on them, but they're all overlong/overstuffed in a way that The Cure's 1979-1985 albums weren't. Wild Mood Swings onwards is strictly hardcore fan territory, but there's some great material in there.

head on the door is not quite as good as the top but i love it a whole hell of a lot

I love The Top and have never understood why folks are so down on it, but The Head On The Door is just magnificent. That line-up of The Cure is the Cure line-up as far as I'm concerned.

I love The Top. I think Cure fans generally do but music magazines always seemed to hate it.

It's the last proper studio album in what I personally see as The Cure's "golden age" which began on their first album and ended with the release of the Standing On A Beach compilation.

HOTD is the last record where RS was the sole songwriter too, I think.

I love The Top and have never understood why folks are so down on it, but The Head On The Door is just magnificent. That line-up of The Cure is the Cure line-up as far as I'm concerned.

I adore The Top, that and Faith are my favourite Cure records. Definitely agree that the Head... line-up was their strongest, The Cure In Orange is just immense. I watched the VHS tape over and over and over when I was first discovering the band.

RS was never the sole songwriter.

If I remember the album credits correctly, HOTD is the only Cure album where RS acts as sole songwriter. He cowrote three of the songs on The Top with Lol.

Ah, perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself then - I presume I misread backwards from the HOTD album credits...

I'd be interested to hear more from the band now about Lol's contributions. In the Deluxe Edition booklets for HOTD and KMKMKM (circa 2006 or so), RS is still definitely sticking the boot into the guy about being drunk and useless but I've always wondered how much of that is actually true. They've clearly patched things up since, going by his appearance at the Reflections shows.

This interview with Lol from Keyboard magazine in 1987 paints a markedly different picture than his usual characterisation as 'the drunk buffoon who could barely play, he seems pretty switched on and knowledgeable: http://www.musicfanclubs.org/cure/press/I15.html