Following the ascent of the “cold trilogy” (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography), the fall for the Cure is brutal with this album that is superficial and flashy.
For fans of the first wave (the cold), after the disco-pop tsunami of Let’s Go to Bed, this sixth album was another painful ordeal to endure—one too many for some, who would abandon the group here and later reclaim it with Disintegration. The cover, a splatter-painted Ripolin look, the irritating single “The Caterpillar” (The Caterpillar) and the hiring of studio goons to compensate for the undeniably problematic absence of Simon Gallup on bass…
The Top reveals a strange malaise much deeper in Robert Smith: for the first time he amuses himself! He drinks and he laughs, Bobby. Damn, we, who counted on him to inject a bit of gloom (and thus fragility, vulnerability) into the artificial hedonism of the 1980s, find him joining, like the others, in these superficial games of the era’s new wave, a mix of bazaar exoticism and flashy pseudo-psychedelia.
Gloomy tempo and alcohol-driven depression
Still biting at the ends—the abrasive Shake Dog Shake at the opener, the magnetically charged The Top at the close, the only genuine high point of the record—the album presents a face certainly more affable and enticing than Faith or Pornography, yet most of the songs lack substance and settle for the ornamental, barely stylized painting.
It should be noted that The Top was conceived during a period when Smith slept at friends’ places more often than a stray cat: with Siouxsie & the Banshees (Hyæna) and in the garret The Glove he had founded with the drummer Steve Severin. From the Banshees he also brings back this troublesome habit of crafting motifs and embroidering songs around them as if it were an upholstery craft. Or sometimes like a pastry chef.
He grafts soft Spanish guitars onto the very poppy Birdmad Girl, drapes unnecessary oriental garlands on Wailing Wall (which, otherwise, would have been a truly beautiful song), wields the flute of the Andes on Dressing Up, and, the height of kitsch, an XVIIIth-century military march on the risible The Empty World, probably inspired by Barry Lyndon. But behind these garish decorations there isn’t much, and the king is naked. It is said that Smith is enjoying himself, but the joke is bitter, the merriment somber, and the alcohol-fueled depression not far away.
The Top, quickly dubbed “The Flop” by the Cure faithful, would mark the first real artistic misstep of The Cure over the length of a full album, leaving us disenchanted with the band for a moment. Even the late converts who danced to The Lovecats the year before shunned this bloated and laborious record.
