Nice review Ian. We have a lot of similar thoughts and feelings about this album. I agree with pretty much everything you wrote other than your take on Three Imaginary Boys. They traded in the reverb from that album for chorus on the following. But they're about equally minimal, I'd say. Seventeen Seconds just gives the impression of minimalism better. The overall sound of the first album is nervous, distant and hollow. SS sounds more fragile; it has a closer and deeper effect.

a wee story bout the cure around 1980 , they used to run there own fan club !! , i found this out cos a parcel consisting of, a 3 imaginarry boys t shirt and some pin badges went missin in the post ! i wrote complaining i hadnt received anything and at that time pop/rock groups fan clubs were getting a lot of bad press !

anyway i got a brief note along with my package saying sorry for the delay they were inundated with orders and included two photo's signed by lol and rob,

first time i seen em was 79 glasgow last time was manchester 04 ,... 25 yrs apart boy i'm getting old .....

GangstaFam said:

Yeah, I got the impression that you and superspaceboy didn't quite catch what I meant the first time.

Just holding these in my hands is such a privilege.

Moonbeam said:

You get 'em at Best Buy? How much were they?

GangstaFam said:

that's where i gotta get 'em. i went to virgin megawhore today and suffered some massive sticker shock - $24.95 for each of the reissues!

it didn't help that on top of the new new order CD, i also discovered the brand spankin' new STEREOLAB box set today, and there's no way i could turn down three CDs, a DVD and a buncha stickers for a measley $19.99.

i think i might take my time getting the cure reissues...i might start with faith, then get pornography, then get the other one...kinda savor each one individually. i have more cure than i can listen to as it is...not that i'm complaining.

I'm not really in a hurry to get these CD's. Besides, I'm still bumping my cassette version of "Faith", which by the way, also includes Carnage Visors.

ok, FINE - i just went out and bought "faith" on my dinner break!

i hadda go get a prescription filled and i didn't realize that my insurance pays for my drugs, so i convinced myself that i might as well spend the money on a CD that i thought i'd have to spend on drugs anyway. nice justification, huh?

"Nothing left but faith/There's nothing left but faith....."

got all 3. all i can say is ..... WOWIE!!!!!

me = on cloud 9.

JonSnow said:

i know i'm not going to be able to show any damn self restraint. my fool ass will own all three by this weekend, just wait.

Anxiety said:

Perfect story for buying Cure cd's.

Anxiety said:

It is useless to resist....

JonSnow said:

So has anybody listened yet? What's y'all's first impression?

GangstaFam said:

The sound quality of the actual albums are amazing - really top notch job. It was particularly awesome to hear Pornography, it sounds so massive!! The packaging is beautiful, as well.

A few notes on the bonus material:

Porn: The high points are definitely the demos of One Hundred Years and The Figurehead. The sound quality is very high, and they are interesting recordings. It's cool to hear them in a more raw sound - almost sounds like SS-era material. The other cool thing was Airlock: The Soundtrack. Very trippy and disturbing. The home demos are low quality intrumentals. Temptation is the most interesting of them - you can sorta make out the LGTB bass line forming. The live material is OK... not the best sound quality, but worth listening to. The live recording of Siamese Twins is absolutely hideous. The sound quality is ok, but the performance is just horrid... slow and listless and no fire. I'm surprised he used it. The demo of The Hanging Garden is quite intersting... very different lyrics and melody. You can sorta hear the song that it turned out to be trying to get out, but it's very underdeveloped. An interesting glimpse into the creative process. Similar to that is the demo of Primary on the Faith bonus disc.

Faith: The best moments are the live versions of The Drowning Man and All Cats Are Grey - - - BOTH ARE STUNNING. The studio out-takes, Going Home Time, The Violin Song and A Normal Story - are all essentially instrumentals with Robert humming a guide vocal. Interesting, but not really earthshattering. The home demos are very raw, mostly intrumental, and poor sound quality.

SS: Really the only thing interesting are the 2 Cult Hero tracks, and the Alternate version of Three - which is basically the album version with some additional effects added, and some improvised vocalizations by Robert. The live stuff is mostly 3rd rate bootleg quality.

All in all, mostly worth getting just to have the regular albums in such spectacular sound quality. You could tell RS was scraping the bottom of the barrel w/ the bonus stuff. Still, some interesting things, and a few jaw-droppers - - maintly the demos of One Hundred Years and The Figurehead, and the live versions of All Cats are Grey and The Drowning Man.

Anyway - that's a brief first impression

GangstaFam said:

ok, that was damn clever.

Alright, i just made the coolest compilation from the remasters.... The Best of the Cure - Volume One I did my own edit of Airlock.. it flows perfectly into Splintered in Her Head if you end it at 2:06 and let Splintered start with no gap. Had to do a little judicious editing a couple seconds here and there to get it to fit, but it clocks in at 79:50.



1.Airlock: The Soundtrack (2:06)
2.Splintered In Her Head
3.10:15 Saturday Night
4.A Forest
5.Cold
6.M
7.Jumping Someone Else's Train
8.Charlotte Sometimes
9.Primary
10.A Strange Day


11.A Reflection
12.One Hundred Years
13.The Holy Hour
14.Play For Today
15.Boys Don't Cry
16.Seventeen Seconds
17.The Hanging Garden
18.Another Journey By Train
19.The Drowning Man
20.Three Imaginary Boys



.
[Edited 4/26/05 20:46pm]

JonSnow said:

Awesome! I've actually been writing out compilation lists too and I usually make my first disc cover this period as well. Great minds.

Anxiety said:

You're the clever one.

GangstaFam said:

Hehe, cool. I'm planning on doing another one for the 2nd phase of their career - LGTB thru the head on the door, after the next set of reissues. Including Blue Sunshine material sang by RS. I know, i'm sad. Only one day after the reissues and i'm already yearning for the next batch!! hehe.

So has anyone figured out yet how The Cure were able to remaster these albums when the original masters were lost?

sextonseven said:

In the liner notes, Robert says that the demos from Seventeen Seconds were lost, not the original masters. I don't know if that helps.

i'm currently listening to 'faith' for the second time in a row today...i never really listened to this album before, just the singles from it, really...i'm loving it. it's one of those albums i can just throw into the stereo and not worry about anything annoying or disagreeable coming through the speakers for a while. i was a little hesitant about these reissues because i wasn't exactly overwhelmed with the 'three imaginary boys' set - i think the simple fact is, and don't savage me too horribly for this, i just don't care for 'three imaginary boys' that much. i like the cure finding their goth/atmospheric groove, and 'faith' certainly has lots of that. now i want more.

oh...and i am SO PISSED OFF at everyone i knew when i was going through my teenage goth phase for not introducing me to 'carnage visors'. how perfect of a goth brat soundtrack is that?!? i totally slept on it until today. oh well. tra la la. love it.

All right.

So far, I've only listened to the Seventeen Seconds reissue, and I am greatly pleased. The whole sound is much more present. I feel like I've been upgraded from the nosebleed section to the front row, literally touching the trees. The instrumentation of this album really benefits from the remastering. Of their whole catalogue, I figured that this one would need it the most. I have to say- job well done.

I disagree with some of JonSnow's assessment of the bonus material. The Cult Hero tracks are quite fun, but some of the live material sounds pretty good to me. Granted, I haven't listened to the bonus material from Faith or Pornography yet, but I was greatly impressed by live tracks such as "M" (so much heavier than the album version with the octave change!) and "Play for Today". There are a few that really do sound like 3rd rate bootlegs: "A Reflection", "The Final Sound" and the Cult Hero tracks spring to mind, but I was pleased for the most part.

I'd also like to add that yesterday was a perfect day weather-wise for these reissues. It was blissfully cold, rainy and cloudy, with no end in sight.

Anxiety said:

I'd rank all three of these albums higher than Three Imaginary Boys. My brother and I noticed that these three albums correspond to the 1980-1982 period for Prince. They are the formative years of the signature Cure sound and form the blueprint for what was to follow. All future releases see a wink or two (or three) to the mainstream, but Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography are unilaterally focused and form a trilogy of their "goth/atmospheric" ascension.

these reissues are helpful to me, because i tend to map out the discographies and musical careers of the artists i like in a way that's kind of like a geography of their style and their evolution and all that good stuff, and to me, this era of the cure is kinda hazy to me, because i didn't really start actively following them until the 'staring at the sea' compilation had been out for a while...then i was all about them during 'kiss me' and 'disintegration', and i fell off with 'wish' and the stuff they did after that, up to just a couple of years ago, really. last night when i was at work staring at my new copy of faith and not being able to listen to it, in my desperation i played 'bloodflowers' on my mp3 player and was really REALLY appreciating it for the first time...that album is such a perfectly realized cure album, and it took me this long to truly realize it. i think it's far more perfectly realized than their most recent album (the eponymous one, that is). and now, listening to 'faith', a few more squares of the map are filled in, and i 'get' the cure even more than i have in the past. i love when that kind of thing happens.

Anxiety said:

Go you!

BloodFlowers is my second favorite Cure album.

I'm glad you like Faith. It is a perfect bridge from Seventeen Seconds to Pornography, incorporating the misty, sorrowful hollowness of SS and injecting some of the more gnarled textures that would form the core of Pornography.

how much is beast buy selling the cure CDs for this week...do ya know?

Anxiety said:

Nope. Best Buy doesn't have them in stock in lame ol' Port Huron, Michigan.

I'd assume they're available for $19.99 a pop, though.

JonSnow said:

That's a cool set.