From my old Blogspot. Originally posted July 11th, 2011.
Download: One Million Virgins
Failure is often more interesting than success, because it leaves the door open. Failures can be debated, reconsidered—even embraced—but are never necessarily remembered, where success is culturally interred.
In 1987, the Cure released what many regard as their finest album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. An eighteen-track two-record set sealed with a blown-out titular pucker, Kiss Me had all the stylistic sprawl of its forebears from the Beatles and Pink Floyd, but was absent any unifying concept, and so closer in spirit to its immediate peer, Prince's Sign O' the Times (especially the original Dream Factory arrangement).
Massive script “K”s on the cover led reviewers by the nose: “kaleidoscopic” was the only word for it, but Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is also something of a missed opportunity, sonically and structurally. At the time, Robert Smith was deep in his reactionary, stubborn twenties, teasing with pop singles then gouging the ear canals of the uninitiated with his signature dirges.
This manic pattern began with 1984's The Top, which followed on a series of unserious synth hits, and the band's biggest-ever single (the inane but utterly unique “Lovecats”). Opening with "Shake Dog Shake"—a paranoiac, acid-drenched bit of arena rock—The Top is disconnected and dissociative, by far Smith's weakest effort from the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, it is hotly contested by fans, and rivals 1982's bleating Pornography as an acid-test for whether or not one “gets” the Cure. Chris Onstad delivered a glancing and brilliant nod to this status in Achewood’s 2005 Volvo of Despair arc.
With The Head on the Door, Smith's pop/art conflict continued: chart-ready material like “In Between Days,” “Close to Me,” “Push” and “A Night Like This” mingled with frenetic drug rock (“The Baby Screams,” “Screw”), florid pastiche (“Six Different Ways,” “The Blood”) and languid balladry (“Kyoto Song,” “Sinking”). The album was a UK and European smash for both band and dedicated Polydor imprint Fiction, and with a newly-solidified lineup, the Cure spent most of 1986 celebrating: a hugely successful greatest-hits album and video anthology, a tenth anniversary tell-all book, a ride on the Orient Express, and a string of lavish festival dates.
Expectations swelled as manager Chris Parry trumpeted the band's commercial appeal down the halls of parent label Polydor, and the U.S. market took note of “In Between Days” (which, with little promotion beyond late-night MTV and college radio, managed to reach #99 on the Billboard Hot 100). An ugly, gated-reverb remix of “Boys Don't Cry” was rushed out in April of ‘86, to capitalize on the Cure’s rising stock, but this should-have-been hit single, largely ignored in 1979, flopped once again. The extant legacy of the “New Voice New Mix” debacle is the iconic cover shot of Robert Smith, snapped during the video shoot.
With the promotional cycle around Head on the Door and “Boys” winding down, the band decamped for Studio Miraval, famed equally for its clientele and its vineyard-lined Riviera campus. Under the working title One Million Virgins, the sessions were the most collaborative in the Cure's history, and inspired demos from each member quickly piled up. More than two-dozen songs were fully completed, and with eighteen selected for the album, some very strong material was consigned to the B-sides of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’s four singles.
At the time, singles brought in major revenue, and were paid greater attention, in terms of the value added by strong flip-sides and multiple editions. But the Cure's motivation was never so cynical: Robert Smith held B-sides in the highest regard, and had always taken them seriously as a reward to die-hard fans. As would be the case with Wish in 1992, many Kiss Me flip-sides gave weaker album tracks (“Fight,” “The Snakepit”) a run for their money. Response was strong enough that a six-track orange-vinyl EP compiling Kiss Me’s bonus cuts came as part of a special edition victory-lap, and the “Why Can’t I Be You?” 12” even featured an extended remix of “A Japanese Dream.”
Twenty-four years later, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me endures as the orange-red exclamation point marking the end of the Cure's first wave. I can’t really say anything unilaterally negative about it, but, having been a fan since it came out, and seeing the critical and popular standing of the album format fall away, the little things I wished were different about the record came back to me while revisiting it this weekend. I decided to put an imaginary “perfect edition” together.
My biggest complaint was always the equalization: the mid-range is completely blown out, the bass is very mid-heavy in the 200-400MHz range, and the treble rolls off somewhere around 12500KHz. For a record that cast such a wide stylistic net, its sonic palette is pitiful, likely crushed in the struggle to marry analog guitars and emerging MIDI techniques. I’ve applied considerably different EQs to pull each song out of that mud (this is not to suggest I have bettered the original mixes, rather that I’ve satisfied my own ears; and in listening back, a couple of my tweaks still run a bit hot). Also on this end you have the vastly improved single mixes prepared for “Just Like Heaven,” “Why Can't I Be You?” and “Hot Hot Hot!!!”—all sourced, along with the B-sides, from German Fiction CD5s, the best-mastered and nearest-to-reel versions.
Finally, the tracks themselves, and their running order. Here I threw out the script and tried to construct an entirely new flow from “The Kiss,” which you can't put anywhere else. Apart from “Fight,” I don’t condemn the songs I cut out, but I always felt “Shiver and Shake” had more in common with “Doubt,” from Faith, or “New Day.” It's great to hear the band in an aggressive mode, but that's well-traveled territory on Kiss Me, which gives “Shiver” the feel of being a tempo exercise, of trying to play really hard and fast. Likewise with “The Snakepit,” which mines the other extreme, of a druggy, spiraling haze. For me that note was nailed in “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,” and at seven minutes, “The Snakepit” tips toward ambient architecture, on an otherwise pure pop record. It would have worked better as a 12" B-side, a la “Just One Kiss.”
I also fixed up the old Razormaid “Resurrection Mix” of “To the Sky,” a fan favorite that has languished in a near-mono state on most bootlegs. This is a unique recreation using the Razormaid original as a structural guide, and the Stranger Than Fiction CD as source. I put the verses back in the correct order, and applied modest EQ, but the vocal phase effects remain, as they were part of the original mix. In the digital era, this swirling sounds irritatingly similar to a lossy MP3, but there's not much you can do: they were going for a watery effect with basic phase shifting.
One Million Virgins
01. The Kiss
02. How Beautiful You Are
03. Catch
04. A Chain of Flowers
05. The Perfect Girl
06. Just Like Heaven (single mix)
07. All I Want
08. Breathe
09. Icing Sugar (alt mix)
10. Hey You!!! (“Hot Hot Hot!!!” single mix)
11. Why Can't I Be You? (single mix)
12. Like Cockatoos
13. If Only Tonight We Could Sleep
14. A Thousand Hours
15. Hot Hot Hot!!! (single mix)
16. Torture
17. Snow in Summer
18. To the Sky (Resurrection refix)