A brisk rhythm track with a bright clean guitar figure pealing above like a surf tune. Smith comes in with his signature crying tone. So far it could be from the debut album but the instrumental passages reveal that the view of the arrangement of a recorded song has risen to avian level; the songs have moved more into the realm of scoring rather than just cherry picking from jams and putting that together. Even if that was what happened it doesn't sound like it, it sounds arranged. Along with their mates from Bromley, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure at their best would follow this, adding a strong sense of cinema to their records. The lyric is the kind of self-gravitating vacuum of teenage relationships. The title and final line are taken from a U.K. tv institution Play for Today which typically dramatised stories from the lower end of the social strata in a kitchen sink style. I'd see them now and then in the '70s and loved how stark and often defiantly anti-enjoyable they were. Here, it's both sincere and ironic.
Secrets begins with the palm-muted flanged guitar and bass so close in tone that they frequently intersect. The chugging persists beneath a lyric of longing for an exhausted affair sung both in a distant reverby wail and a close up and dry murmur. Two brief verses of impressions and the obsession chugs on. This approach in the instrumental track would speak for most of the band's output for the next four or so years when they broke out of it. But for now the pattern that could be used cheaply to evoke early '80s post punk lived here.
In Your House doctors the formula to an arpeggio on the (still flanged) guitar against a forward moving but groovy rhythm section. Robert Smith's vocal is again buried to allow the ambience to prevail. He tells of moving around the second person's house, changing the time and pretending to swim while drowning. Is he a ghost or does he just feel like one? The drums play out, machine-like, until the end.
You can find transcriptions of what Robert Smith is saying at various places online but until someone did that all you could tell was that someone was talking. It sounded like they were relating something like an event but it was too difficult to say. A tinkling piano playing octaves through a delay. The distant speech. a few guitar slices. A drum machine or a drummer playing kick+snare without variation. Wormy, squiggling sounds on a guitar low in the mix and the constant motif of tonic+semitone up+tonic+semitone down repeats before it falls into a rapid kickdrum decaying through an echo. The foreground tells you to worry and you do because you will never understand what the witness is saying. Minimalist mystery theatre.
The Final Sound opens the old side two with a waltz-time figure on the piano that sounds like a derelict house before the tape itself screws up and it stops.
When the dark harsh synth riff emerges from the shadows and the chorused guitar riff picks out an unresolved figure we are entering classic territory. The band already had a few songs well enough known to even peripheral fans to render them singalongs (my brother at the time delighted more than anyone else around him in singing "burn like a tyre in Cardwell") but A Forest was the epic that sealed it. The drum machine starts with the basic kick and snare tone augmented by a kind of hi hat whisper. The bass fortifies the synth figure and the guitar chug emerges from the riff. Smith again comes in low in the mix. A verse about seeing a girl or not gives way to a change in the guitar chug tonality over the constant of the bass and synth. Another verse. Same. The final verse sings the frustration of a dream where you are denied what you want until you wake up and want to get back into the dream. "Again and again and again and again..." A new guitar figure soars until the drums and bass pare down to a heartbeat. The guitar lifts ever higher but fragments (never had modulation effects been so expressive) and dissipates into the dark. One last progression by the bass and it, too, falls and rolls away into an echo.
M surprises by sounding like a brighter throwback to the first album, a pacey two chord riff on acoustic guitars and a straightforward 4/4 push. As a film buff I always thought this was about the Fritz Lang proto noir but M stands for Smith's beloved Mary, eventual wife. Still, if a love song it's happy with its spot in the shadows as the obscure lyric both admires and fears the subject who attracts him but daunts him with powers he doesn't understand. In other words, while not conventionally romantic it's an accurate description of the thoughts of someone in love. It's not all sunshine and kisses, folks, it can be paranoia, anxiety and despair as well: sometimes they just all feel the same.
At night begins with a spacey drum sound and distorted bass that sound like Joy Division's first album are augmented with a sax-like keyboard figure that removes that impression. Smith's distant vocals have a Latin descent to them. At the end of the verses the same ascending two chord riff is joined by a chorused guitar. The second verse gets an extra fuzz bass even further into the foreground. And the lyrics; is he a stalker? He stands alone in the icy night while someone else sleeps in a safe bed. He suggests that someone has to be there in the solitude, in the dark. Someone must be there. The gaps are where this story plays and something unlovely and cold lives there. The buzz of a synth and a distant processed guitar that sounds like a dog barking falls to silence.
The usual minimalist drums are joined by another chorused guitar playing minor chord figures. The bass fills the gap as the figure is repeated. The bass picks up with semi-quavers before a more synchopated groove. Smith comes in. A dry vocal much further up front than any so far on the record. The final thoughts of a suicide? The disappointment of anyone still young and learning how flimsy even the best things are and could collapse in as little as seventeen seconds. The wish never came true and the girl starts to sing. The girl might be the end ("the opera ain't over ...") Whatever it is, that time interval is seen as a measure of life. Is it bleeding out? Something is going on after the thoughts end. The guitar chords finish and the drum pattern, now dry and closer, leaves us with a final couple of beats before the silence. End.
To read this you might think I'm describing some massive goth fest but really the thing that strikes me more now than when I first heard this album (when fresh in 1980) is how understated it is. The Cure, along with the Banshees and Bauhaus etc., went on to upscale their images until the big black hair monster overtook the look and T-shirts sold in their millions. But for the moment it was a band who'd already shown their skills and were already moving on to produce music that was too strong to forget but also too difficult for the mainstream. If you YouTube the video for A Forest you'll see what I mean here. It's a long song without a chorus and the band whose hair is neat and short wear jumpers rather than capes. Smith frequently fills the screen, lipsynching straight down the camera, keeping his expression plain. Images of forests dissolve in and out of view but mostly it's just the band playing. This is definitive post punk as it eschews the marketing image of flamboyance for something everyday while the music speaks for itself; a reaction against the plastic glued up spikes and torn jeans.
It wouldn't last but didn't have to. Smith and co. grew into what would soon be called goth and embraced that for a few very successful years before moving on again. The freshness, cheek and invention would wear out as it always does. Until that started, though, there was this set of pieces that feel coherent enough to identify with but without the grandiose overstatement of a '70s concept album. It's why it still works. Yes, its chorused guitar tones and telephone vocals and drum machines scream early '80s, regardless of how many hipsters copy them and cry postmodernism, it's not the datedness of the sound but the essence of the feeling. It's from the doom of the early X life under the nuclear apocalypse and it's time stamped. That said, I don't consider the notion that period-specific culture is any the less for that character. I've heard too many defences in the name of timelessness made in the name of things whose blandness and conventionality should have them all but shunned by their decade of origin. If flavourless garbage like Steely Dan or ELO are timeless I'll take dated any day. This is from 1980, sounds like it, and it sounds good now. If you've been young and felt, you've felt this.
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