The Cure – Faith (1981)

I first liked just the hit songs by The Cure. Boys Don't Cry and Friday I'm In Love and similar kinds of melodic hit songs. I didn't fully understand the appeal in bleak and dark gothic rock that had very little in terms of melodies. I had to first find the brilliance of Joy Division to understand The Cure. This music is all about darkness and the aesthetics are drawn from horror film imagery. It very much depends on my mood what I think about The Cure. Sometimes their music may sound very crushing to me, while sometimes I can completely lost myself into their melancholic and industrial sound. I feel like, if I'm already feeling down, I can't listen to them, because it takes me deeper into despair. This is definitely not something that will lift your spirits and make you feel confident with yourself. This is something where you can explore the deepest emotions of human beings.

Faith is one of the darkest The Cure albums of all times. It doesn't have the upbeat punk attitude of the first album and it doesn't yet have the hit potential of the late 80s and early 90s albums. Faith just really sounds like Joy Division. Simple songs carried by steady drum beats and treble-heavy bass lines along with echoey and crushingly sad vocals. I think UK was a particularly bad place to be in the early 80s (most likely because of Thatcher), because otherwise I can't see why such crushingly melancholic bands could've been born. Faith is not a long album. It only has eight songs and even the longest of them is just over six minutes long. I think this album couldn't be any longer or you simply couldn't stand the weight of it.

The album starts with heavy bass lines in The Holy Hour. These sounds are very similar to Joy Division's music of the same era. The drums sounds dry and industrial, while the bass carries the song onwards. Guitar also sounds like it's stripped of all sound engineering. Primary has a faster tempo and even though the Joy Division style is still there, I can already see similarities to many more 80s bands such as Depeche Mode on this one. It's interesting how they're combining fast tempo drumming and quite upbeat vocal bits with complete bleakness and dark aesthetics. Other Voices goes darker again. This is a song that will really bring you down if you're already quite blue. All Cats Are Grey has some smooth synth sounds that pave the way for the sounds of the later 80s. The tempo stays really low and the volume stays down as well. This is somehow eerily hypnotic. The Funeral Party takes on even more synths. This is the sound of David Lynch films. I'm immediately reminded of Twin Peaks soundtrack with Julee Cruise's songs. Doubt brings on the punk again with steady drum beat and aggressive vocals. This actually reveals the link to the punk scene most clearly out of all of the songs. The vocals don't sound too dissimilar from Sex Pistols. The Drowning Man starts with a slightly lighter touch with its guitars and hand claps, but as the song progresses, it plunges deep into despair again. The album ends with the title-track Faith. This is the longest song on the album, but most of it is just bleak drum beat topped by dark bass lines and guitars.

There's even a music video I found! Music video for Primary is a very simple music video showing the band playing the song with occasional grey stylistic that reminds me of the album cover. Seeing Robert Smith as so young is fascinating. The video quality is surprisingly good for the early 80s.

People who have known me for longer know that I'm a fan of melancholic music. But there's something really crushing in Faith. It's quite difficult not to get very anxious while listening to this. I don't blame goths of the early 80s for losing all joy in their life if they were just listening to this kind of music all the time. Then again, I don't really know which came first, the bleakness or the music.

Listen to the album on Spotify.