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The Cure
The Head on the Door
[Deluxe Edition]
(Fiction/Elektra/Rhino)
The Music Box's #7 reissue of 2006
First Appeared in The Music Box, September 2006, Volume 13, #9
Written by John Metzger
The making of Pornography nearly tore The Cure apart, and it initially
appeared as if the band would not survive its release. Front man Robert Smith
was caught between leading his own outfit and playing guitar with Siouxsie and
the Banshees. His drug-fueled exhaustion significantly tempered The Cure’s
transitional follow-up The Top, an album that remains more important for
the groundwork that it laid than for its scattered contents. By 1985, however,
Smith had found sobriety, and his personal rejuvenation resulted in the
ensemble’s first bonafide classic The Head on the Door, which essentially
gave his reconfigured group a new lease on life.
Lyrically, The Head on the Door continued to mine the dark despair of
brokenhearted teen angst, and Smith’s dreamlike reflections of death-filled
nightmares, disembodied heads, and screaming babies made his emotionally
detached portraits of adolescent alienation vivid. The difference, however, is
that the oppressiveness of Pornography’s music had given way to a more
accessible and appealing style of heady pop. Driven largely by the addition of
former Thompson Twins’ drummer Boris Williams as well as Smith’s reunion with
bass player Simon Gallup, The Cure embraced an eclectic array of insistent,
rhythmic grooves that ranged from the explosive, U2-influenced Push to
the flamenco-kissed flourishes of The Blood to the infectious, shimmering
swirls of Inbetween Days. Elsewhere, the group reverted back to more
ominous textures by slathering the mechanical chug of Kyoto Song with
twinkling keyboards, but where the album-ending Sinking previously might
have sounded claustrophobic, the ensemble’s new approach lent a more ethereal
quality to its arrangement. In the end, The Head on the Door proved to be
The Cure’s rebirth, and the concepts and ideas contained on the outing became
the touchstones to which the collective returned for the duration of its career.
Like the previous releases in Rhino’s campaign to reissue The Cure’s back
catalogue, The Head on the Door features a second disc that is stuffed
with an array of studio and home demos along with a handful of bootleg concert
selections. None of the material is essential, of course, but it does provide
insight to those who care about how the album itself came into being. Not
surprisingly, the home recordings largely are skeletal fragments that emphasize
the fusion of melody and rhythm, while the studio work is realized more fully.
Of particular note is the perky Lime Time which yielded its DNA to both
Inbetween Days and Six Different Ways. Elsewhere, Screw
sounds like an outgrowth of David Bowie’s canon, and the intensity of The Cure’s
stage show radiates through the murkiness of the deluxe edition’s three live
cuts (The Baby Screams, The Blood, and Sinking), all of
which were recorded in December 1985 at Paris’ Bercy Theatre. Although The
Head on the Door wasn’t quite the commercial success for which The Cure had
hoped, it certainly paved the way for the better days that lay ahead for the
band.
The Head on the Door [Deluxe Edition] — 
Bonus Tracks —
The Head on the Door [Original Album] —
The Head on the Door [Deluxe Edition] is available from Amazon.com.
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The Head on the Door [Original Album] is available from Amazon.com.
To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
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For UK orders, please
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2006 The Music Box
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