The Cure are strange here. From Three Imaginary Boys to Seventeen Seconds to Faith to Pornography I hear less the constant difficult birth of other bands than a steady intensification of one approach over time. You can easily trace the melodic patterns just of the vocal parts from Fire in Cairo to 100 Years but where the first is studiously spare, almost arid, the latter is dense and swollen. It's almost as though someone steadily poured a vat of cornflour into the music. Pornography is the monster version of Three Imaginary Boys. Afterwards, things changed: more light, more variety, more air, more success. Until then there was this.
I've put myself to a test here. I'm writing this one from memory. A little cheating has happened in that I've listened to it about five times in full over the last week. While I can recall the insistent whirling riff of the opening track and the aural break by the slower paced Siamese Twins to the backwards voice on the final and title track the rest just sounds like what an A.I. would create if programmed to make a Cure album.
The modal, minor tonality, the non rock drumming (is there a single snare hit in the whole record?) and the anguished vocals all fit the profile. There's even a single, Hanging Garden, but in context, it retreats into the texture. Compare and contrast the other single from this time that didn't make the album: Charlotte Sometimes. It feels like a classic, bigger than anything before with both space and intensity and a haunting refrain ("sometimes I dream"). I wonder if I'd notice it if it had been on the LP.
So far, all this sounds like a hatchet job. However, what is emerging as I write this is that, in being a kind of distillation of the band's music from the beginning to this point, it serves as a kind of intentional no-brainer. If you hear it you cannot argue that there's less craft on show. The production feels nothing but deliberate, vocals are variously out front or buried, the guitars and keyboards continue their rockless exploration, and so on. It just doesn't reward a close listen.
At the time it was released I'd heard a few tracks on 4ZZZ and was happy to hear another Cure record was in the offing. I was over someone's place for tea and biscuits one afternoon and noted the Curey music under our voices and gaffed, "can't wait to hear their new one." Um. "This is the new one," said mine host. While that was a decent joke on me he wasn't smirking in the slightest. And then he said something stranger still, for a Cure fan: "It's a bit Cure-ish, isn't it?"
And that's it, it's less Cure than Cure-ish.
The other side of this is that when you put it on and go about your dailies it really sinks in. It's an album of album music the same way that Exile on Main Street or the White Album. You don't put Pornography on to hear The Figurehead, you put it on when you're in a Cure mood. This is apt and actually pretty useful, when you think about it. Apart from anything else it fits the history, the band were getting exhausted, physically and creatively and this record was meant to punish. It was meant to be Phil Spector in Hell, an angry note to themselves and all their fans: you want more? Take this!
The thing is that when you do listen over your shoulder while your doing your dishes or taking an urban hike, it comes to life as a living film score. It's the gloom of the early '80s for the ages. In comparison, you can get to name every track on Closer or Travelogue but Pornography is like the drunkest black light party you ever went to; there's no song by song, it's just an interminable corridor of bodies, noise and screams. But that's why it's good.
