The Cure: "Plainsong" (1989)

In the mid-80s, the Cure released three of the most musically varied and experimental albums of their career. In place of the monochromatic murk of the Death trilogy, The Top, The Head On The Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me often seemed to be angling for a sound that was more anarchic, freewheeling and, ultimately, joyous than what had come before. In some ways, those aspirations would be fulfilled by the Cure’s early 90s albums, especially Wish and Wild Mood Swings, which were similarly cluttered and variegated in tone. But they were momentarily folded back into murk for Disintegration, a high water mark in the Cure’s career. And, as the opening track on Disintegration, “Plainsong” feels like a statement of purpose. Many of the murky signatures are still there – vocals that bleed into guitars, monumental organ swells and unresolved chords that seem to leave the song jutting over the precipice that gradually comes into view as the rest of the album. But it’s all overlaid with a sparkling theatricality that’s somehow even more pessimistic than the morbid murk of the Death trilogy – if this is the sound of Robert Smith finally breaking the surface of the water, it’s only to witness just how wide and glittering the waste that surrounds him actually is. He may have saved himself from drowning, but he’s surfaced to the most desolately beautiful ocean imaginable, and that’s very much the tone of the album, which eschews the crypts, apses and transepts of the earlier Cure for something like the full cathedral. Once, plainsong may have been a way  of communing with  that sacred space, but Smith’s feels excommunicated from the very structure it was supposed to adorn – it’s a missive from the deepest, darkest exile, a series of chords and key changes with only the remotest, frostiest memory of the home they once had.