Two years after “The Head on the Door,” Robert Smith and his associates delivered in 1987 their most collective work, where tenderness and anger, spleen and dancefloor, coexisted.
For a band that has often practiced musical monochrome and austerity, this double album proved to be a revolution, the equivalent of what The White Album or Sandinista! respectively represented for the Beatles or the Clash. An all-encompassing exploration, a joyful release from constraint.
The result of weeks of sessions in the cozy Miraval setting in Provence, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me lets the new wave crew, then fully in command, create without taboos and without hierarchy – for the first time, each member pushed, drafted, proposed, rather than handing everything to the leader. This broadly democratic approach culminated in a work with facets so diverse that it is impossible to truly embrace it after a single listen to its eighteen tracks.
A Giant Musical Role-Playing Game
Following The Kiss, a postpunk-noisy opener with no compromises (Smith sings after four minutes of furious guitars), The Cure follows an elastic inspiration that allows it to transform from one song to the next, until stepping onto the dance floor with Why Can’t I Be You.
The band allows themselves a range of emotions previously unseen, moving from anger to tenderness (the sublime single Catch), from the groovy Hot Hot Hot!!! to the ballad One More Time filled with spleen. The atmospheric songs with dense instrumentation (where Porl Thompson’s saxophone often emerges, sharper than usual) thus sit side by side with more direct and pop-oriented tracks such as Just Like Heaven, whose instrumental version for a long time served as the theme tune for the show Les Enfants du rock.
This display of exuberance mixed with melancholy ends with the combative Fight, which evokes Led Zeppelin’s Eastern-tinged Kashmir. A chameleon band, The Cure manages to flourish in this giant musical role-playing game without losing its identity or its soul. Subsequently, the band’s discography would lose the dash of madness that makes Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me memorable—a labyrinth in which getting lost remains a source of intoxication.
