Following their magnum opus Disintegration, this ninth album released in 1992 offers nothing particularly new. Yet it hides a few gems, including the wonderful Friday I’m in Love.
Returning to a middling album from a flagship band whose legend has endured far beyond its peak brilliance, and despite its evident decline, becomes, in hindsight, a delicate stylistic exercise—perhaps not easily integrated… When The Cure released Wish in 1992, its original fans understood it as the quintessential emblem of the new wave doomed for a long time to mourn its masterpieces. And they are not wrong.
From the wreck of the original lineup, only Robert Smith and Simon Gallup survive — four years earlier, Laurence Tolhurst had abandoned them to his alcoholic drownings. Moreover, The Cure could never reproduce the desolate archetype of its despairing trilogy (Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography). There had indeed been the magic Disintegration (1989), but the sense of an ending was already in the air.
A Retrospective Reading Can Only Be Indulgent
A new decade was meant to turn the group’s virtuosity toward a page that would plunge them into a desert of inspiration, mired in tautological nostalgia and commercial formatting. Yet, if one goes through their recent discography, the result seems so lean—two or three good tracks at most per album—that Wish becomes appealing, simply for containing a bit more than a meager trove of pearls. A survivor.
What a pleasure, then, to (re)discover there the thwarted splendor of Apart and its fabulous bass suddenly torn apart by the mournful breath of Smith. Striking, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea still suggests love’s uncertainty against a backdrop of harsh guitars. When, after a magnificent languorous intro, Trust frets about not being believed (“I love you more than I can say/Why won’t you just believe?”), To Wish Impossible Things buries, under a fine rain of strings, the vestiges of a fallen couple for eternity. Yet to reduce Wish to a mere procession of love anthems for Tranxene addicts would be a mistake.
This record is also capable of exultation. Witness the celestial surges of High or Friday I’m in Love — a bracing peak on the charts that feels like a shot of liquor in the middle of a snowstorm. That same energy can easily eclipse the pallid classicism of Open, the Jurassic churn of a shrieky Wendy Time, the blithe silliness of Doing the Unstuck… If its instrumentals stretch on forever, it is more due to following a formula than to the original spark of creation.
Similarly, if the torment in Smith’s vocal work no longer exudes the primal spontaneity of the band’s morbid early days, the even-tempered Wish remains nonetheless the best thing The Cure has produced in over twenty years. Fueled by that temporal factor, its retrospective reading can only be indulgent. Right or wrong.
