Men in Black (Page 3)

If you are a casual admirer of a band (or, for that matter, of any kind of artist), the major works are quite enough. If you're a serious fan, though, and especially if you're a cultist, throwaways and ephemera become enormously more important: They flesh out the image of the artist in your mind, and inform your understanding of the major work. Smith has kept the extra stuff flowing for twenty-five years, in a way that makes it clear that, as much as he enjoys it himself, it's not to be evaluated by exactly the same metrics as his "real" records. (As excessive as nearly five hours of Join the Dots seems, there's plenty of stuff that wasn't included here.)

The rule of diminishing returns has set in as the Cure's cult has grown and Smith has gotten locked into his lipsticked, fright-wigged persona. At some point, his gift for sharply snaking melodies wriggled away from him--probably around the same time that the Cure's songs stopped being compact and hook-driven and started being based on tedious midtempo rambles. The third and dullest disc of Join the Dots has exactly two memorable tunes, and they're both covers: Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and David Bowie's "Young Americans." ("We were trying to do something that was very grand," Smith admits of "Dredd Song" in the booklet, "but it somehow turned into something very grandiose." So why bother re-releasing it, then?) Most of the final disc meanders badly, too, and half of its songs are alternate versions of album tracks (including a new and annoyingly pointless remake of "A Forest").

Still, even on autopilot, the Cure sometimes manage to get over by the sheer force of their style. Join the Dots' second disc includes an audacious joke: three consecutive versions, from 1990, of the Doors' rather un-Cure-like "Hello I Love You." The first is in the slowest of their standard modes: a lotus-eater's tempo, Smith's moan echoing backward and forward so that the H in "hello" is aspirated for a few moments before it appears, quilt-thick keyboards droning away. The second returns to the brisk snap of their hits of that period, and the whole band perks up; Smith is playful, scatting a little at the beginning, singing the words as if he's giggling and whimpering at the same time. The third is a ten-second punk-rock throwaway, included for the sake of excess. None of them are first-rank Cure, but as an illustration of how the band can switch on multiple kinds of Cure-ness at will, they're fascinating, and they're a prize for the faithful. That's the mark of a true cult artist: someone who can serve up leftovers and get away with calling it a feast.

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