Saturday, January 12, 2008

461. The Cure - Seventeen Seconds (1980)
















Track Listing

1. Reflection
2. Play For Today
3. Secrets
4. In Your House
5. Three
6. Final Sound
7. Forest
8. M
9. At Night
10. Seventeen Seconds

Review

Yay! The Cure! There's few things I love better than crap-lipstick-applier Robert Smith and even if this is not my favourite Cure album it is still a damn sight better than most other stuff in the world ever! Yes indeed!

So I am writing this in the morning after a night of debauchery so excuse my curtness and by the way, HAPPY BIRTHDAY WIFEY! Now that that is out of the way let's resume music-talk.

Seventeen Seconds is a really downbeat album for Cure standards, Cure have always seemed to me to be actually a happy band behind all the gothy posing but here there is a quite oppressive, almost industrial sound to the music which works really well. A Forest, the best known single of the bunch, is a perfect example of this, this is the earlier gloomier Cure, none of the Friday I'm In Love malarkey here. And this is actually better, the beat of the whole thing is pretty ahead of its time going for the apocalypse disco sound that post-punk has loved since Fodderstompf by PiL and developed to perfection here. Highly Recommended.

Track Highlights


1. A Forest
2. Play For Today
3. Seventeen Seconds
4. In Your House

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Seventeen Seconds was lauded by some critics, and panned as a "collection of soundtracks" by others. One reviewer described the album as a "sad Cure, sitting in cold rooms, watching clocks". Despite the mixed reception, the band was featured in several lengthy articles with numerous photos of a slender Smith, without makeup, who one critic called "alarmingly handsome". There was controversy concerning the band's "anti-image", established by the cover of Three Imaginary Boys, which this album contributed to by blurring the photos of the band's members and the cover art. This is the first Cure album Smith was able to choose the art for.

The Forest:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well this is my favourite Cure album. If it were up to me, Faith would also be in this book, because Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography are some of the best albums ever, especially the great deluxe re-releases of them. Tracks on this like A Reflection and The Final Sound I really found interesting, because the Cure never did anything as ambient as this before or after.

GreGreG said...

this is my favourite one too....
And "A forest" is one of the best song ever...

Jeff Haywood said...

Definitely my favourite Cure album.