'Wish' by The Cure
The Cure should be recognized as a great singles band. Witness “Friday I’m in Love” from their 1992 album, Wish. The song’s catchy harmony of words and music, the suggestion of a melancholy undertow beneath the up-tempo surface, is worthy of Lennon and McCartney and embraces all the verities of great ’60 pop rock.
However, much of Wish, like most of their material, features a gray wide-horizon soundscape with big guitars and the rainy-day vocals of Robert Smith. As the band’s frontman, Smith presented the image of a distracted fop, tussled hair with smudges of mascara, wearing his vulnerability like a baggy duffle coat. Many of Wish’s best tracks, including “High,” moved at a sadly soulful tempo. “Apart” was brilliantly morose, chronicling the realization of a relationship fraying night by night. The poetically ambitious “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” is stadium rock built from materials similar to U2, but in a deep sulk rather than a bid for eternity. With a chorus of “let’s get happy,” “Doing the Unstuck” summons optimism from the gloom. Wish is the soundtrack of a society on the verge of the Prozac Nation, depressed but summoning bursts of hope and energy.
The 30th anniversary edition of Wish includes two additional discs of demos and alternate mixes, enjoyable but not revelatory except as stopping points along the course of completion, and several beautiful instrumentals originally released on the Lost Wishes cassette.
