The Cure - Seventeen Seconds
"Time flies and we don't. Strange would be if we flew and time didn't, the sky would be full of men with stopped clocks".
Alessandro Bergonzoni
Winter is an important event, not a season but a set of humoral, perceptive, mental elements, in an unhealthy physical conformation only for those who fear it. In music, it has given art a way of scouring its boundaries, of hiding its magnitude, of joking with the paucity of joy, of writing deceptions that could replace reality. Doubts, indecisions seem to take root and bloom quickly, to be able to coexist, perfectly, in a situation between the dramatic and the comic, with radical and dutiful choices.
There are those who, like The Cure, closed one decade and opened another by making time seem like an unserious, unbelievable joke, forcing their listeners to choose whether it was better confusing fairground of Three Imaginary Boys (with some nice rides for sure) or the sky greyed by substances of difficult description and, above all, assimilation of the second album.
Seventeen Seconds is a nightmare of a personal vicissitude for the band leader, as he makes his love life a mirror for his ghosts.
Seventeen Seconds is a sea that hides the humps of its waves to reveal a feverish state that paralyses the limbs but not the senses, throwing all impetus into a perpetual state of measurement: of time, of space, of compulsory catharsis, of sounds that anticipate melody and chords, and of fear, which in these grooves wears the outdated mask of sincerity.
Seventeen Seconds is a stratagem to conceal the colours of life where punk had ensured its absolute absence, to instead uphold, through a melancholic implant, the right to seclude oneself.
Seventeen Seconds visits the possibilities that different genres of music tried to materialise, to escape the nightmare of definition, to pay homage to the past, and to give the present a crooked smile.
The vocabulary and the encyclopaedia of life always travel together, not in music, and it is good to point this out. Indeed, it is enough to note, listening to the group's second work, how the words and sounds smell of antiquity, but fail to generate something truly new. Instead, it is the whole of a perspective that indicates that the laboratory of ideas only passes through the man from Blackpool and that the other members are the perfect labourers, the executors of those limpid attitudinal greynesses that have suddenly made a boy of almost twenty-one into a man with all the maddening descents of fragments to be reassembled in order to give dignity a resistance.
Seventeen Seconds is the dimmed chandelier of those eighties, which in the first two years will fall prey, on the one hand, to disengaged, frivolous music, agglomerates of perfect nothingness to prevent thought from being solid. On the other of an impotent mass that, having lost its social opposition, ventures into the cataclysm of an inevitable interiority.
The four write the story of a universe never before traversed by investigations, by the fear of the flow of existence, of losing oneself without breath, of feeling the foam of anger become a lump of secrets to be kept in one's own home, that of the mind that does not yet know the exact terrain to hide in.
A musical ensemble that seems to wink at the concept of an agglomerate that tells of the moment of maturity, of forced choices, of a game that is only worth it for a few seconds, only to land in a toxic cloud of hastily massaged intuitions.
There are several novelties that will make this second artistic episode the first letter of the alphabet of a new necessity, one that does not have the pop candour of the debut in its lap, but rather the handbrake pulled with tiredness and haste at the same time. The rusticity of the sound carpets is in front of our amazement and, whenever the album is in our hands, there is always the feeling of losing something in its short duration, as genius reveals beauty but not the manner through which it is made visible. The production ends up between the fingers of Robert Smith and Mike Hedges, in a collaboration that has the flavour of a brief armistice, given the propensity for control on the part of the instrumentalist and singer who places Matthieu Hartley on keyboards, aware that the operation will be short-lived. But, undoubtedly, what we are listening to is not a work of guitars or any other instrument: it is a corollary, more than honest, of a choice that sacrifices all virtuosity (only two solos by Robert Smith in the whole work) to give us a slab full of vibrations, of twilight and breathlessness that clench, in slowness, in an attempt to protect life without necessarily having to adore it. And it is here that the album's true masterpiece dwells... Punk and post-punk lived on screaming extremes, on bombastic pelvic manifestations, on hustle and bustle exhibited without alternative. The genius working in the cellar of his own fear activates different resources, appears in time, measures it and then wears it on songs like, precisely, winter clothes.
Rusty metal stands out in search of a vocal echo, of rarefactions that lead to a cognitive reverberation without gagging, in almost robotic rhythmic sections, close to the uncaring impetus typical of the drum-machine, which is devoid of feelings. The chords (ancient concoctions that range from Lou Reed's Velvettian vomits) to the more aseptic ones of progressive outposts, align the fluidity of death against the harshness of life, in a hypnotic form of assemblage that frightens: there is no trace in this work that does not have the dirty side of the night on its shoulders... The roar that can be heard is that of thoughts and not of words: the latter are calibrated, often leaving space for the musical wall on which they affix their intention to manifest their existence, but do not take on the responsibility of being indispensable. In fact, following this logic, all the compositions allow, in the silent and trembling listening, to verify their structure, their solidity, and in this way the entire project becomes a concrete hut built in the heath of every tremor. There are several moments in which the absence of singing induces us to reflect: is this not a mighty victory? Gallup's bass is nothing more than the assembly line of melodies that could have belonged to the song: none of this, the good Simon distributes golden tombstones, refrains already in the stanzas, for something little heard before. The sound is devoid of the frenetic solicitation of effects: he doesn't need them, and for this reason alone, we find ourselves stunned and immobilised by the beauty of this manifest form of courage.
As for Lol, he remains the same as he was on the first album: a non-drummer who becomes indispensable, recognisable and on whose work everything else takes the spotlight, but it is impossible to deny him the merit of giving The Cure's sound something unmistakable.
Ten Winter Winds cleave the sky in an inconspicuous wound: Seventeen Seconds lives on suppositions, on hints, where the journey is not made by places, by people, but by a healthy fear on which, willy-nilly, the future is defined. Here, in this human dimension, The Cure sow seeds never to find themselves in the same labyrinths again, and it was already conceivable that everything in their career would be built on opposites and their satellites. In fact, both this and Faith but also Pornography present, clearly, the relationship between life and death, demonstrating, in each of the three episodes, those elements that make their music sound like the anticipation of consciousness.
However.
But here we have modesty, shyness, the encumbrance of reality that screams and it is up to these sounds to numb its impetus. The hints of shadow, in Smith's acute mind, manage to steer the orchestration of the whole towards a plane where listening is above all grasping first and explaining after an infinite perception.
Another magical and portentous moment of this ensemble boiling in atmospheric ice, where the coldwave seems to have chosen to put on wings but hiding its flight. A tale, an examination, an ink between hands full of glue, in the sweat of the cement that stands firm reaffirms its role: it starts here to understand the enormous validity of this obscene beauty that has lasted for forty-four years.
It begins wordlessly, with chords like a funeral act in progress, echoes of youthful laments under the tension of a bass and guitar that seem to play with light. How does one define the fragility of age, the silences that question fear? By writing A Reflection, the outpost that creates the fear of loneliness, after an earthquake that has left a gift of dry chords that mark time without the need for drums.
The tension of Sheffield in chaotic London: that's what the first few seconds of the opening track are, an attitudinal manifesto in search of an emotional hiding place. Everything here is prone to neurosis devoid of rhythmic stuttering but extraordinarily powerful. One enters the lapidary statement contained in the first verse to realise that with Play For Today one finds oneself with soft but not romantic brushstrokes, with the four-quarter that channels us into the sound of a guitar that surrounds the Seventies and makes them surrender: Robert Smith's approach to the instrument with a primitive style is a clear slap in the face to those who, when they wielded it, sought to amaze. Here, what bewitches is the ardour of a track that cannot deprive itself of bass and drums, where the keyboard wins out even if only in the few seconds in which it is given free rein. The second track is a clear breath of fresh air for the thoughts of a boy who finds himself an adult in pain: the only escape is to play with life, in just one day...
Post-punk atoms kiss the skin of pop dreams that could never have that conscious form. And yet, even today, this track brings different forms of listeners together. Of the series: magic cannot be explained but is lived... Secrets arrives and the purity of fear manifests the intention to use two out-of-sync voices, on different registers, to soften the play of minimalist, sombre, frenetic guitars and the bass that caresses the track, almost fearfully. The piano chords are theatrical, showy, simply imbued with drama, and the acoustic guitar's Spanish-style mini-solo is later found in The Head On The Door.
Like a candle seeking shelter, so the song seems to activate the memory of the vagaries of glam, in ballads that hinted at sound without making it disruptive.
Here comes the sublime In Your House to remind us of Three Imaginary Boys: something of the debut album lives on in the arpeggio of the six-string and it is only the keyboard, with only two chords, that moves everything into the realm of novelty. The existential world map here narrows the boundaries: starting from breadth (thus having to exclude the outside world) to grasp the uniqueness of brevity, along the terrain of paucity and approximation. Irresistible is the fact that the song form, in this case, becomes skeletal, using a bridge, which proves more effective than the refrain. Waiting, trembling, keyboard keys that seem to render mute the words of a minimalist but extremely effective lyric in nailing the attention towards the cellar of reflection. What looks like a drum machine is instead the backbone of a rotating music, like a music box standing along the corridors of a house that doesn't know how to escape itself. Everything is microscopic, probing, as if the water in the kitchen could never boil....
We find the same structure as Three in A Forest: with the bass doing the same thing here as the keyboard does in the album's most famous single, four chords in succession on which the song finds strength, intimacy and courage, as well as meaning. Only apparently instrumental, this jewel hosts the distant voice of Robert Smith, for a situation that seems to come straight out of a Mario Bava film: hinting provides much more tension than shouting... Here are the caresses of guitars that evoke Suicide at the beginning and then away, in the theatre of notes that fall as if they had learnt the game from Bela Lugosi Is Dead: hinting and then structuring the sound in a magnet on which small and rudimentary contraptions seek an arrangement that makes the whole thing subtle. And it is pure evocation, the dramatic theatre of Oscar Wilde entering Kurosawa's cinema: ardour and slowness in the dance of suspicion.
The absurd lasts for a short time but it is a neurotic catapult: a few notes for a few seconds create unease with the frightening The Final Sound, the farewell to any form of song, the attempt to make nightmares collide and feed them to the sounds, to generate a stuttering current, in the merry-go-round that does not concede a new ride.
That arrives with A Forest, the seal of a sound, of an adolescent story that is invested by the reality that does not make concessions, where self-love puts the collective one to flight, and the boundaries are disrupted by imaginary moving trees. The body seems to be born from swooping eyes, while the legs seek oxygen in the metallic motions of a guitar that surrounds the darkness to deliver it to the velvety strokes of the bass. The structure is simple: the alternation of a lyric with the sound mimicry, which does not use frills, let alone exaggerations, but feeds on the dust raised by a confused race, which will find its climax in a reverberating echo of the finale's 'Again and Again', where the adolescent love earthquake does not know death but something, perhaps, even more frustrating: the fear that does not cease to run together with the dream.
The song will be the beginning of the end: epigones will spring up like mushrooms, and, nowadays, certainly poisonous. The aura full of mystery is inclined to the Sarajevo coldwave scene, but it is the guitar that shifts the coordinates, to make us believe in the last scream of a post-punk without oxygen... The light of The Cure in 1980 was deceptive: it sought the new Three Imaginary Boys by putting more rhythm into it: here it is, the M that first confuses and then makes you collapse, in its swinging movement between the search for a pop form and its perfect negation. One finds oneself alone, lost, at night, with this sonic slingshot, which demolishes illusions and crystallises them, to dress them up and attack, as soon as possible, the desire for death through the life of these impetuous notes, almost as if they were courtesans at the service of the pleasure of the depression of taking a walk in company...
The first song on Pornography could have been At Night, the nineteenth-century sneer of a lot of confusion of a mind in debt to oxygen: less heavy sounds than on the fourth album, but the same, magnetic ability to darken the breaths and nail the nerves. The episode in question is the perfect armistice between the one that closes the album and Siamese Twins: in a riff, the sky is hidden and drops open to stiffen the mind, creating a space where awareness takes us back to birth, to residence (our home) and the moment when time swells with fears (the night).
The keyboard, almost hidden, will be the one that inhabits the stage in Faith and the cellar in Pornography: a killer mantra that removes all dreams from the passing of time... What would seem to have a measure: Seventeen Seconds is the wardrobe that shuts out your breath, the one you can inhabit for two hundred and forty-one seconds, only to leave you widowed of all hope. Catatonic, rigid, it brings the notes into the funnel of a paralysis that excites, because of its approach to picking up the other instruments until it increases its speed, like a slow tornado full of itself...
Smith's voice is a candelabra in the wind of time: fearless, he emits coded sounds that cling to his guitar in a lethal pairing, with the two notes of the keyboard welding time and the unfinished sense of existence, giving the drumming the power to appear and disappear as if everything no longer made sense. If death has a beginning, here we find its identity card in the concluding track, in which, like a silent cry, everything comes to an end...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
14th July 2024
