September 2005
“I’d pretend to be a vampire, like stories ‘round the campfire, I’d suck your bloody froth. [extravagant slurping noise] Yes, the thing I’d be best at is impersonating Lestat if I only were a goth…” –Thoushaltnot, If I Only Were a Goth
We seem to have changed things up a little. For the third Cover Version outing Wilson has chosen something from a band the Crimshirts probably don’t hate, and did something with it that wasn’t another acoustic guitar arrangement.
But my gosh, what’s new there to say about The Cure? We’re familiar with the more new-waveish radio-friendly hits, of course, and Robert Smith’s distinctive stage presence and tonally-depressing singing voice. Their imperial era runs from Seventeen Seconds in 1980 to Wish in 1992. Pornography and Disintegration are incredible masterpieces of unceasing balls-to-the-wall emotional agony. Their other albums are less goth-inflected, and while they’re certainly comfortable in their usual pocket of overwhelming baroque gloom, it’s a sound they have something of a complicated relationship with. It’s less a fundamental Wilsonesque discomfort with Doing One Thing as much as it is the desire to do more than the One Thing once in a while.
In terms of where Steven Wilson enters the picture, we have to go back to Seventeen Seconds. 1980 finds gothic rock still under construction as a concept (Bauhaus had released Bela Lugosi’s Dead only the year before), and as a consequence The Cure still sound very much like a very moody post-punk band. You look at the video for our song of the hour and Robert Smith doesn’t have the smeared makeup and the frizzed out hair yet. That said, although we’re not doing anything particularly macabre or theatrical yet, this isn’t an inhuman slab of Ballardian misery like Joy Division either. This isn’t the material desolation that was the fuel for punk and post-punk, this is a desolation of the soul. What we’re experiencing in Seventeen Seconds is an externalization of inner psychic turmoil, but since the explosive heights of Pornography is still two years away, what we get here instead sounds quiet and introspective.
There’s obvious value in subtlety, of course. Seventeen Seconds still has The Cure’s sense of enveloping gloom, just curling in at the frayed, raggedy edges instead of an omnipresent all-consuming howl of agony. If you’re unfamiliar with The Cure beyond the hits but have a passing knowledge of post-punk, Seventeen Seconds is as good a place as any to start, and if you need a push to get into Seventeen Seconds, go listen to A Forest.
Smith has given conflicting explanations as to the song’s origins; in 1984 he said it came from getting lost in a forest as a kid (I keep seeing secondhand sources state that the experience may also have been a dream, but I’m not sure where that came from), but later on he became more elliptical, saying, “It’s just about a forest.” That’s fine. Where the lyrics came from isn’t all that important. Here’s what is important: the protagonist went running into the forest hunting for a girl who was lost, only to discover that the girl was never there, it’s actually he who got lost, “running towards nothing, again and again…” indicating that the forest is actually a metaphor for his own alienation and futile attempts to find direction in his life.
A Forest was The Cure’s first charting single in the UK, and as such is as good a starting point as any to begin tracking the band’s ascendancy into mainstream recognition, so in that sense its appeal as source material for a Steven Wilson cover is obvious. And, well, of course Steven Wilson vibes with The Cure. Although the band isn’t anywhere near as tightly-wound as Porcupine Tree, they share similar sensibilities, and Wilson’s stated saddest-songs-are-the-most-beautiful ethos has a clear antecedent in what The Cure were doing in their imperial phase. Even their happier, more accessible songs like Friday I’m In Love or Just Like Heaven have a particular bittersweet undercurrent to them, and one gets the impression that just like ABBA a decade earlier, they’re laughing because otherwise they’re screaming.
Steven Wilson’s cover of this song is an incredible beast. Here he does the exact opposite of what he did with Alanis and ABBA and beefs the song up such that it somehow manages to become more alienating and oppressive than the original. The instrumentation leans on a quiet-loud dynamic where it’s somewhat minimalist and atmospheric while Steven is singing but becomes a pounding, powerful wall of sound when he isn’t. Wilson’s vocals are, like Robert Smith’s, mixed way in the back, getting completely lost in the swirl of noise once he gets to the song’s twist.
But what’s most interesting about this cover is the fact that it’s performed almost entirely on keyboards. The only time we hear any guitar is at the five-minute mark, hauntingly repeating the song’s riff as it fades out. It feels less like a forest and more like Basildon Town Centre. In that respect, then, this song is pretty important to Wilson’s musical development because it’s the first time since IEM’s demise that a song of his (a) leans on electronics this heavily, but (b) isn’t for one of his minor projects. As such, then, this sounds more than anything else like an early taste of what he’d get up to on Insurgentes and The Future Bites. This, in turn, is important because up to this point Wilson’s solo output consisted entirely of simple acoustic guitar songs and abstract electronic experiments. Now, though, his solo career has developed a shape that he can build something off of, allowing something like Insurgentes to exist.
PS: I guess we’ll have to talk about the B-side at some point. Four Trees Down reuses some of Shesmovedon’s verse structure to unimpressive returns, and I will forget it existed once I post this.
Catalogue. Preserve. Amass. 