In 1981, the British goths’ third album continues the rough draft started with Seventeen Seconds and drives a second nail into the coffin of the then-dying punk scene.
Faith is it The Cure’s best album? It is, at least, positioned between the two records that typically garner the most votes: Seventeen Seconds and Pornography. In a way, one might too quickly think that Faith is merely an interim record, a darker echo of the aesthetics inaugurated with Seventeen Seconds and the embryo of the magnificent abyssal atmospheres of Pornography.
But Faith is not merely a transitional record. It is perhaps, indeed, the true jewel of this trilogy: the middle album, it carries within it far more irresolutions, dilemmas and tensions. For, even as on Seventeen Seconds Robert Smith had begun an elegiac descent, affirming his own disappearance as a singer, on Faith he seems hesitant to fully own his act.
A Disenchanted Communion
Thus, from the second track, the anguished Primary, he launches, a little louder than usual, a real cry of distress: “Please don’t change.” As if he no longer seemed quite certain of his identity, of his future. Then, as the listening proceeds, Faith gradually settles in, with restrained pains, rendered with ascetic minimalism.
As on the previous record, no note breaches the line. The rhythms are austere and razor-sharp, the guitars resonate with density, and the layers of synthesizers forge an atmosphere of a deserted chapel — precisely the one hinted at by the gray cover, as if caught in wartime.
Faith is a record of desacralized communion, a crumbling cathedral. Listening to it is to witness firsthand the birth of gothic rock, presented here in its purest sense, for, without frills, The Cure continues to build there, implicitly, its timeless portrait of malaise, which will be fully realized with the next album in the form of an inner apocalypse.
