CLASSIC ALBUM: The Cure – Pornography

The Cure’s fourth album, 1982’s Pornography is, along with its predecessor Faith, the grimmest album in the band’s huge discography and is possibly the album that best argues the case for the band’s un-moving position on the Goth-Rock throne.

With careening guitars and yelped, desperate vocals, Pornography opens in extreme fashion, throwing the listener in at the deep-end with the epic gloominess of One Hundred Years, and any sign of light is pretty much blacked out from herein. A Short Term Effect, shuffles with a cold, minimal, Joy Division-esque rhythm while guitars blur backwards with psychedelic stereo-panning. The psychedelic elements of Pornography are key to its long-term success, as while the record is undoubtedly gloomy, the sonic effects at play here give this post-punk album a hallucinatory edge.  Yes, the post-punks we’re dropping acid and while one may enjoy to wallow in static gloom, Pornography allows the listener to be submerged, wandering lost in its ghostly, uncertain landscape.

The rampant, frenetic rhythms of The Hanging Garden are amongst the most ferociously insistent the band ever created. The riveting nature of the band’s playing and Robert Smith’s possessed vocals propel the band to psychedelic heaven, snaking like some vampiric reincarnation of 60s garage-psych. The Figurehead is classic, slow-burn Cure, the desperate drama of its guitar motif matched by Smith’s seemingly inexorable declaration of “I will never be clean again”. A Strange Day is the closest the band gets to anything approaching daylight, yet this track is still replete with gloriously bleak imagery “the sun is humming/my head turns to dust, move slowly through the drowning waves, blind dancing on a beach of stone/Cherish the faces as they wait for the end”, and so on.

The closing title track, blurs into view amidst indecipherable speech recorded from either a TV or a radio that is gently engulfed by foreboding synthesized drones and hypnotic, tribal rhythms and distorted, textural guitars. Smith joins, albeit heavily blockaded by the trails of noise, as he intones “I must fight this sickness/Find a cure” on what is the darkest track on the darkest album in the band’s discography. Pornography is one of the greatest albums of the post-punk era and is perhaps along with Echo & The Bunnymen’s Porcupine, the greatest psychedelic album of its time.