“It’s as if I’d been looking for this melancholy, monolithic puddle of a record my whole life, and once I found it, I wanted to lie down in it forever while the world collapsed around me.” That’s what Canadian Airick Asher Woodhead told the webzine “Drowned In Sound” when he was asked to talk about his favorite album DISINTEGRATION. Woodhead may not have made a big impression with his own project Doldrums, but here he highlights an important characteristic that distinguishes his favorite record from the other three dark exploits of The Cure – SEVENTEEN SECONDS (1980), FAITH (1981) and PORNOGRAPHY (1982): They froze their listeners alive, dragged them into the field of fog or simply threatened to crush them – in DISINTEGRATION However, you want to lie down in it! The record offers a full bath in melancholy – and self-pity. There is something comforting in her sadness.
There are many other musicians for whom this work has become a monument, a role model and a turning point. Many of them are clearly too young to have been caught in his net while still a teenager. Unlike James Murphy, born in 1970, head of the electro-rock unit LCD Soundsystem, on whose comeback album AMERICAN DREAM (2017) the website “The Ringer” probably not completely accidentally identified moments that sounded “as if you were playing all the songs from DISINTEGRATION at the same time” – Murphy told the “Guardian” how important The Cure were to him in the late 80s and that it broke his heart when he found out Lol Tolhurst left the band (more on that in a bit).
Ben Gibbard, singer of Death Cab For Cutie, first heard the album as a “sensitive, emotional teenager,” and it gave him the desire to write his own songs. Arcade Fire’s Win Butler was only nine in 1989, but caught up with DISINTEGRATION in high school and listened to it “pretty obsessively.” This left its mark, among other things, on the sound of Arcade Fire’s disco-rhythmic REFLEKTOR album from 2013.
We can also find The Cure’s masterpiece in favorite album lists of acts as diverse as Pale Waves, Warpaint, The Soft Moon, Chvrches and many others, all of whom tend to have a melancholic style – and as I said: many of them are younger than you might think, they refer to DISINTEGRATION as a long-established classic that not only made an impression on the dream poppers and shoegazers of the early 90s.
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