The Cure—The Head on the Door

The Cure—The Head on the Door

The Head on the Door—The strange disappointment of The Top (1984) was a necessary venture for the Cure. Three Imaginary Boys (1979), Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981), and Pornography (1982) were all fairly solid and artful or at least charming, though every one was imperfect, and they were all somewhat internally repetitive; the latter three especially were somewhat unvaried. Murkiness was the name of the game, but the songwriting of Robert Smith, Lol Tolhurst, and Simon Gallup wasn't uniformly great, and so it often detracted from the atmosphere. They threw out the book for The Top, and while it produced something far from a masterpiece, the direction they were headed was promising. The optimism of songs like "The Caterpillar" and the non-album singles "Let's Go to Bed" and "The Love Cats" were refreshing after the drugged-up, despairing mess of Pornography.

Between The Top and The Head on the Door, the Cure were joined by guitarist Porl Thompson (who played on Three Imaginary Boys and The Top but never was credited as a full member) and drummer Boris Williams (which freed Tolhurst from the spot to play keyboards full-time). The extra personnel brought new dimensions to an aspect of the band most would not expect: songwriting, which contrary to popular belief was never handled solely by Robert Smith.

The bright, polyrhythmic "In Between Days" was their best song to date, and the first song since Three Imaginary Boys where the Cure actually sounded like a band—also note the recurrence of Smith's "feeling old," to be compared with "I Want to Be Old." The unsettling dream "Kyoto Song" hooks the Cure's trademark grotesquerie with keyboards like they never did before, helping them make the transition from post-punk to new wave. "The Blood" was one of the first songs to diversify their sound, adding flamenco guitar to the mix; "the blood of Christ" refers to an exotic wine. "Six Different Ways" is a cutesy keyboard-led piece with elements reused from Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Swimming Horses" during the brief period in which Robert Smith was a member of that band. It was one of the first truly saccharine moments for the band that were generally disowned by the fans of gloomier goth music, but it showed that when they wanted to, they could command major-key melody with ease.

"Push" is excellent, quintessential post-punk. "The Baby Screams" forecasts "Lullaby." Radio favorite "Close to Me" is a trademark Cure song where the listener doesn't know if it's a love song or a nightmare. One must wonder if Smith or someone was referencing the basic nature of the dissolving-relationship song "A Night Like This" with the line, "The most gorgeously stupid thing I ever cut in the world," although "Screw" is definitely the album's throwaway. "Sinking" more closely resembles the following three albums, unwittingly foreshadowing the water tones that were all over that period.

Although The Head on the Door has neither their best song nor a plurality of their best, it is the Cure's most consistent, tightest album. It was less drudging than their early period and less overwhelmingly indulgent than the albums that followed, even though their best individual moments were yet to come.