In 1982, alcohol and drugs intrude into the final installment of Robert Smith’s band’s cold wave trilogy, stirring a merciless unease, between a death drive and a life drive, in our teenage souls.
Following Seventeen Seconds and Faith, Pornography, released in May 1982, closes (in beauty) what is commonly referred to as The Cure’s “glacial trilogy.” If it may not be the stark, black-hued masterwork some fans a touch overzealously celebrate online, this third installment nonetheless asserts itself as a major opus, a pivotal milestone in the band’s rich catalog and a seminal representation of a genre then in its infancy: cold wave – the frosty branch of the new wave. Cold is, in fact, an apt title for one of the eight tracks (and certainly not the least) that this album, in the form of a cathartic nakedness, contains.
Confronted with interior demons growing more menacing (the shadow of suicide hovering nearby), against which alcohol and various drugs give him the illusion of protection, Robert Smith bares himself here without pretense and, violently torn between a death drive and a life drive, reveals a profound malaise. Free from any form of complacency, the album, though gnawed by doubt, never sinks into depressive languor or nihilistic vehemence.
Obsessive Sonic Spirals
The work of a trio that, despite internal tensions, seems imbued with extreme cohesion, Pornography is defined throughout by an impeccable tonal precision and an unrelenting dryness of its sound—a sound to which Phil Thornalley, stepping in for Mike Hedges as producer, brings intense nuances, both ghostly and metallic.
From One Hundred Years, a splendid opening track whose obsessive spirals unfold over nearly seven minutes, a (high) tension takes hold and remains unbroken all the way to the concluding and very percussion-driven title track, unquestionably the most radically singular (in a tone close to industrial music). Beneath the apparent coldness, a burning fire traverses Pornography: delivering the quintessence of The Cure’s early-era style, the album carries post-adolescent spleen to an incandescent degree.
