Then, in case you thought this was going to be a Debbie downer record, a few choppy flange chords and we're galloping along with the single Primary. A battery of twin basses (one a Fender VI) warped with the modulation effects that would illustrate the band's signature sound for the next few releases creates a tough dark restless motion. Images of the innocence of children and the awkward horror of a first love. The final lines include the primary colours in their images as Smith wails that the children of the first verse are still dreaming. Smith has dedicated this song to the recently suicidal Ian Curtis whose own crushing observations had fashioned the previous year's Closer which variously raged and whispered its way into the nervous systems of a generation. More generally Smith has spoken of the song coming from thoughts of dying young and staying innocent and going further to the notion that murder might be seen as a gift. No, that doesn't mean that Robert Smith wanted everyone to come along to a Cure gig armed: this was a moment when such statements were made to strengthen the line beyond which blared the grinning perfect teeth of the mainstream. The song hovered below the top 40 but everyone who went to their increasingly large gigs knew it.
Other Voices opens with a standard drum pattern and a distant guitar shimmer that is taken over by a front and centre picked bass with a chunky riff. Wails in the distance before Smith comes in with the lead vocal. The narrator, abandoned, lives with desertion and eight million people, belittled by inner voices, recalls intimacy but it's ghostly, insubstantial, perhaps imaginary. "Change your mind. You're always wrong." Smith has a way of singing words like wrong that makes them sound simultaneously like self-pity and candid observation. In a way this could be the sequel to Killing an Arab as it reminds me of the same book. The way I described Albert Camus' novel The Outsider (L'etranger) is that it made me understand that all those other voices of greater society were right and would only ever be right and that I, in keeping my distance from them, was always going to be wrong. The thing is that I liked being wrong.
All Cats are Grey. A solid but easy rhythm is joined by a solemn but very easy synthesiser moan playing the same kind of modal scale heard throughout this album. A breezy, floating momentum takes over. Smith's vocal is distant. It seems to be the monologue of a corpse. It might simply be an allegory of depression or a genuinely imagined experience of death. The long-drawn beauty of the keyboards and gentle bearing of the drums fades. End of side one.
A grand swathe of synth strings, big bass and spacey drums might remind today's listeners of the Twin Peaks theme. Another buried Robert Smith vocal tells of the Funeral Party. Smith has explained that this is about his experience of the death of his grandparents. He watches and thinks of them from childhood, into maturity and then as the pale figures they are in death. As with most of the rest of the album, the structure is established with very little variation but the dynamics come through in the weight of the lyrics and vocal performance, creating a sense of inevitability.
Doubt comes on like Primary the Sequel with galloping bass, slashing guitars and a near identical vocal melody. This is not from want of inspiration. If anything it's an admitted other side of the earlier song, describing a violent rage against the other (a lover, himself?) Well, while it doesn't hold up as a literal account, the title plays fair by telling us of the scale and context of the violence that drives him to repeat "knowing I'll murder you again." While there is so much imagery in this album taken from religion very little of it is offered as a direct commentary of it, used instead for the riches it provides as metaphor. The most violent song on an album called Faith is a song called Doubt, it's opposite. Here the doubt doesn't so much prevent action as haunt the one who has acted. Less Hamlet than Raskolnikov.
And then Faith continues the sound of inevitability with a steady slow pattern, solid bass riff and flanged six string. Smith is less buried than he is for most of the album. If anything, it is the stylistic recap of the whole set as it finally comes to rest on the overall title and theme. The lyric is typically a mix of clear imagery and obtuse statement. The unignorable line about raping children might be a literal reference to the darkest corners of organised fiath but, more typically it might be htere to get our attention to its violence and horror. The narrator rejects the traditions, the pageantry and ritual as so much dressing and leaves with nothing left but faith but the clear suggestion is that it is not faith in robes, crosses, stars or crescents but that which remains from denial of them and it doesn't sound like faith in a deity.
It was in 1981, in Britain as here in Australia, an unreamarkable thing to be an atheist. Indeed, the only people you met who made anything of it were those who reached it through oppressive experience. The Cure's use of the iconography of a child's view of religion does include commentary on the dark puzzles of the culture of the church finds a wealthier vein in taking its difficulties into the unforgiving daylight. Self-examination, the dangers of relationships, the paralysing doubt and violent response to it are all observable in the everyday, the horror of banality, the banality of horror.
And that's the thing here: you could listen to this now, never having heard it before, and easily conclude that it was the whingeing of precious emos, a symphony of snowflakes who had nothing more to add than cries of "death be mine!" But I only need to breifly repeat that this music arose from a world in real terror of its own annihilation by a cataclysmic nuclear final act. I'm not saying that they had no choice but to sound gloomy but that the great field of the mainstream was smiling as though nothing was was wrong. If the personal was, as the phrase went then, political this was and remains a political statement, no less than seomthing like Closer or Colossal Youth. Could they have lightened up just for one or two tracks? Well, you go back there with Bucks Fizz being waterboarded down your throat and try it: you're going to sound as bleak as you can get.
This is a source point for what became goth along with The Banshees and Bauhaus and very few others.. If it seems a little childishly extreme in its negativity, give it enough listens to hear it fully and you'll hear a lot more than the application of black eyeliner. Recall, too, that all the cliches of horror movies themselves had source points and blaming Halloween for having a monster that keeps getting back up is to blame the invention, not its copies. Until Bauhaus adopted something closer to theatricality (which The Damned had also done but that was more theatre-restauranticality) this music was really just considered contemporary and I will happily attest that it fit perfectly into party tapes and radio play. There would definitely have been some who sat in dark rooms shivering at the sound but I didn't know any (and that is still pretty hard to do in Queensland).
Forty years have left this record a free standing artefact. Like my favourites from most eras this one sounds of its time and reaches without effort into our own. This is not because of any feature that marks it as a clear ancestor of more recent far (the programmed drums and guitar effects forbid that) but because of the humanity at the centre of its every moment. Faith is a record of people on a quest to know what they are and will report their findings whether it makes them look naive or jaded. It's also a rewarding listen because it's good and it's honest.
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