Join the Dots
Friday, January 30th, 2004
OK, here we go. Cure heaven. Join the Dots is a collection of b-sides and rarities from 1978 - 2001; all the years the Cure was on Fiction. Now they’re out of the contract and off on another label, so here comes the Fiction cash in. Thank god it’s an amazing collection… and amazingly enough, there were a few things I didn’t already have. I mean, I’ve got all the singles, spent more money on one vinyl 12″ to get one song than this entire box set costs, and spent an inordinate amount of time scouring p2p networks to get various rarities, and there were still a few things I had never heard…
That said, there are still some glaring omissions…. no “Split Milk”… none of Robert’s acoustic solo stuff, “Cloudberry” and all of those… “Forever”? What about Cult Hero, damnit? The “Love Will Tear Us Apart” cover is nowhere to be found, or “Pirate Ships” for that matter… and it would just have been nice to have stuff like the “A Sign From God” and “Yesterday’s Gone” with it - sure, that stuff was done with other people, but really… it’s the Cure.
It comes with extensive linear notes, some great pictures, and some good stories which mostly make you hunger for a “20 Imaginary Years” to come out some day (”10 Imaginary Years” is a book covering their first ten years) so we can find out why the revolving cure membership door keeps spinning…
On to the songs… disc 1 covers everything from the first b-side (”10:15 Saturday Night”, which is much better than the single it was paired with) through the Head on the Door singles… it’s all great, with the flexi-pop version of “Lament” being the highlight for me as I only had a crap mp3 of it before. Some of these are great - “A Man Inside My Mouth”, “Mr. Pink Eyes”, “Plastic Passion”… others are deranged and give you a great view into the breakdown he was going through while trying to keep the Cure together, playing with Siouxsie and the Banshees, doing the Glove project with Severin, and basically taking shitloads of drugs.
Disc 2 picks up with the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me era stuff, through Disintegration and Wish. Arguably, this was the Cure at their creative peak, and the b-sides are fucking amazing. Certainly, this is when I discovered the band, teased and backcombed my hair to all hell and started wearing makeup. Highlights on this disc for me where a new mix of “Icing Sugar” and an unreleased “psychedelic mix” of “Hello I Love You”, “To The Sky”, and a new mix of “Fear of Ghosts” which is much, much crisper and sparkly… some of these b-sides are again much better than the singles they were paired with, but i’ll get into that later…
Disc 3 takes on Wish through Wild Mood Swings, with some soundtrack stuff thrown in for good measure. There’s a rocking, previously unreleased take of “Purple Haze” - the released version is kind of dancy, this one proves they know their way around a guitar and marshall stack. “Burn” comes from the Crow soundtrack and it’s one of my favorites… “Dredd Song” from the shitty Judge Dredd movie, which even Robert admits sucks. Well, not flat out, but you can read between the lines.
The highlight on Disc 3 is without a doubt all the b-sides from the Wish-era singles… revisionist history can be fun. I spent quite some time when I first got my iPod going through and making best of and dream albums. One of my favorites was taking Wish (a good Cure album, but not quite one of the greats) and replacing some of the singles with b-sides. Try it some day - take out “High” and drop in “This Twilight Garden”, replace “Friday I’m In Love” with “Halo” (although all the high school girls loved “Friday” when it came out, thought it was the best love song ever and looked at my hairdo with a little more interest than fear, “Halo” is a much more honest and moving love song), and then take out “Letter to Elise” and put in either “The Big Hand” or “A Foolish Arrangement”, both of which are amazing songs…. and whammo, you’ve got a fucking GREAT album. It was interesting to read in the linear notes that Robert apparently agrees with this practice, as a number of the b-sides were slated to be on the albums or even be the singles, until the last minute when they got dropped. But regardless, you can make some really amazing albums through the judicious sprinkling of b-sides.
Even good enough to be in Fat Bob’s self-appointed Holy Trilogy of Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers. At which we all politely nod, wait for him to shuffle out of the room, and put Bloodflowers back on the shelf (because, quite frankly, it’s not all that great) and pick our own personal favorite Cure album to replace it (Kiss Me, Faith, 17 Seconds… the arguments fill a thousand discussion boards, usually right next to the rank the Radiohead albums rants). Just for the record, I’m a 17 Seconds man, and not just because it’s got “A Forest” on it.
Speaking of “A Forest”, while we all agree with Stan and Kyle that “Disintegration is the best album ever!”, “A Forest” is the. best. damn. song. ever. Which leads me into Disc 4, where things go slightly off the rails…
Disc 4 has all the b-sides from Wild Mood Swings and Bloodflowers, none of which are all that exceptional (except for “It Used to Be Me”, which is on the tail end of Disc 3)… the disc is rounded out with “More than This” from the X-Files Soundtrack (also unexceptional), the one track I had never heard at all, called “Possession”, which is nice but didn’t make me scream with joy, and some odds and ends like a cover of Depeche Mode’s “World in My Eyes”, some interesting alternative mixes of tracks from those albums, and a god-awful Paul Oakenfold mix of “Out of This World” which should have been left on the hard drive it was created on. Curve (another of my all time favorite bands) did a remix of “Just Say Yes” which is alright, but I never liked the original song that much so there you go, and then there’s a complete re-recording of “A Forest” featuring Earl Slick, which is intersting and groovy but somehow fails to capture the spirit of the original song, imho… there’s no throbbing bass, no slinking guitar lines spiralling up and down the scales, no mood, no atmosphere, no mad bat vocals flying off into the ether. Not that any studio version of “A Forest” works for me either - this is a song meant to be heard live, loud, and extended. Listen to the version off of “In Orange” or even “Show” (well, the DVD anyway - they didn’t put it on the american CD release). Now, that’s fucking music. The best version I ever heard was at the 1989 Dodger Stadium show - alas, I only have a cheap bootleg with horrid sound quality.
So there you go… all this has done is make me very sad for the current state of affairs in the recording industry. No band would get the time to grow and experiment like this. There are no more singles; b-sides are live versions or cheap acoustic takes of the main hit tacked on to the album now to try and increase sales, or held off for a special “Best Of” CD that comes two albums into a band’s career. Where is the thrill and agony of trying to track down a rare song on some import only single? Where’s that delicious moment when you get a new single, a month or two before the album’s going to come out, and you analyze the b-sides for hints of what’s to come?
Yesterday’s gone.
