The Cure: The Top

The Cure: The Top

1984

Fiction Records

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1. Shake Dog Shake  2. Bird Mad Girl  3. Wailing Wall  4. Give Me It  5. Dressing Up  6. The Caterpillar  7.  Piggy in the Mirror  8. The Empty World  9. Bananafishbones  10. The Top



This is one of the odd Cure albums I'd never heard until recently...I just couldn't ever find a copy of it, since it had went out of print by the time I started buying Cure albums, so it had always been a bit of an enigma for me...Of course I had read all the reviews and heard all the talk about it being "the worst Cure album"...A confused transitional mish-mash that could never match the pitch-black majesty of "Pornography" or the kaleidoscopic pop of "The Head on the Door." A year or two ago I finally found a vinyl copy at Eastside Records and quickly picked it up to hear what I had been missing all these years...

I tend to find the Cure's discography to be pretty consistent...Listening to this, I can't shake the feeling that its failures often seem exaggerated in the name of giving critics some sort of angle when discussing the record...It still sounds like classic Cure to me, anyways...Very eclectic and all over the place, in stark contrast to the consistent mood of their previous three albums....But in the long run, the Cure would end up making many other albums in this far-ranging vein...

Still, I think I might work best if I break "The Top"  down track-by-track....That actually sounds kind of fun...I don't do this often...

1. Shake Dog, Shake: As you can probably glean from the track listing, a lot of the songs on this album feature animals in the title, so I thought it'd be nice to bust out that big, green tacklebox thing full of reference cards, so we could do a bit of cross-referencing..Anyway, "Shake Dog Shake" is something new...I don't think we've heard the band do thudding hard-rock before, but it suits them pretty well...And I like the swirling vortex of psychedelic guitar...

2. Bird Mad Girl: For some reason, I don't find this to be as weird as most Cure fans do...Romantic head-rush pop with flamenco overtones;  this would sound right at home on "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me."...Robert seems to have so many melodic ideas for the song and he appears to try them all, so it takes a couple listens to realize how many ear-worms he's packed into the track (my personal favorite moment being the "Some of this, some of that..." section...)

I guess the line about the polar bears is kind of weird, now that I hear it again...So is that suave falsetto croon that pops up from time-to-time...Either way, one of the best tracks on the album, and it would have worked great as a second single....

Wailing Wall: The Cure do world music! Actually, they'd end up doing this type of thing a lot of times throughout their career...Conjuring the sweltering mysticism of the middle-east with some guitars, drums, and a splash of keyboards...And that mass of wailing voices at the end have the ability to creep a fool out when listened to on proper headphones...

Give Me It: Somehow manages to be ear-splitting without loud guitars...Damn, those drums are turned up high...I can picture a young Trent Reznor hanging out in his college dorm, listening to this track and taking notes...Comes off as bit weak though...There doesn't seem to be any real idea here outside of, LET'S MAKE THIS FUCKER LOUD!!! Despite the hair-raising mix I find myself staring at my watch an awful lot during this song...Maybe if there was a killer hook buried in somewhere in there...

Dressing up: This song took a long time to grow on me...I'm a huge fan of 80's synthesizers, however, there's a couple of settings that seem to have aged poorly for me...a. That synth-hit sound that you hear on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and b. the Pan Flute Setting....A song featuring the Pan-Flute setting is just incapable of ever kicking ass...Oh, and this song also features poppin' funk-bass...So there's two strikes...But I don't know...Over the last week or so I've gone from dreading the song to looking forward to it...That "Dressing up, Dressing Up" chorus is insidious...The first couple listens are like, "That's it? That's the chorus?" Then suddenly you're humming it everywhere...I think I'm sold now...



The Caterpillar: One of the Cure's most bizarre (and best) singles...I don't even really know how to describe it, and I don't think "ebullient"  even begins to cover it...Random piano runs evoke the strange, bobbing flickflickaflickaflicka of butterfly wings, as Robert stutters about a cata-cata-cata-catapillar girl...It's always disorienting, like searching for a can of beans in the cupboard and suddenly finding your big, fat head peering into some colorful fantasy world for three minutes...Songs like this don't come around too often...

Piggy in the Mirror: I can still remember listening to this for the first time, hearing Robert camp it up during the ungainly verses and being turned off...Yuck...But then suddenly it blossoms into a beautiful, psychedelic Beatlesesque chorus and I couldn't help but fall in love...And somehow that initial experience still sums up the song for me...You feel kind of sick and awed at the same time...Brilliant, queasy pop...

The Empty World: Starts out like a grim death march, but then the piccolo-esque keyboard line comes in and there's an air of  hallucinogenic whimsy... I have a hard time not considering this track filler, though....

Bananafishbones: The title sets off all sorts of red flags for me, but man, this song is great...Featuring wordy lyrics and a thrilling, theatrical vocal delivery, this unlikely entry ends up being one of the tracks that steals the show...I'm chalking it up to an inventive keyboard performances that veers between a Late Night horror movie and 60's garage rock...By the way, I have no idea if a bananafish is a real animal or something JD Salinger made up...I couldn't find a photo of one anywhere, so I drew one in MS Paint...I imagine when you catch it, you peel it and there's fish-meat underneath...I also imagine the inside of the peel has scales...

The Top: I bet hardcore Cure fans eat up this mopey, droney shit, but it wears out its welcome pretty quick for me...I guess I don't understand why they ended this beautiful, bright nightmare of an album on such a grey note...Not a bad song, just grates on me after awhile...

And there we have it...A messy, chaotic but ultimately rewarding journey....It definitely has its flaws but in most cases even its flaws are fascinating...This is one of those albums you can listen to over and over and you still have a hard time pin-pointing its ever-shifting colors...Don't buy into that "worst Cure album" bullshit...Save that for "Wild Moon Swings" or something...Like I said, we're still firmly entrenched in the classic Cure era here...

Here's "Caterpillar by the Cure...Enjoy....