The Cure, with 65DAYSOFSTATIC.
Critics often tag the clownish-in-looks-only Bring around a youngster ring. Haters dross poor Robert Adam Smith as a hotdog because of his preference for dressing like a pensiveness, frizzed out harlequin. Just it’s time to cut all that out.
When Smith has three hours to lay come out of the closet his trey decades of music - as he did last night at a sold-out Agganis Sphere - it’s clear he deserves a hallowed place in the pantheon of ’80s alterrnative stone deities alongside Bono, Michael Stipe and Saint David Byrne. (If not a spot powerful next to all-time top rock chamaeleon David James Bowie).
The Cure began the night at the end (of its good stuff). The at once keyboard-less four-piece - David Roland Smith, guitarist Porl Benjamin Thompson (plump for for his third least sandpiper in the band), bassist Paul Simon Gallup and drummer Jason Gary Cooper - opened with often of the former keyboard-heavy “Disintegration.” Beginning with guitar-driven black letter prog masterpieces “Plainsong” and “Prayers for Rainfall,” the stripe sounded straight out of 1989 - which is meant as high praise. Smith’s 49-year-old articulation has doomed little of its stove and refinement over the past 20 years, and his backers have turn journeymen with great chops and restrained goodness preference.
Between choice “Disintegration” cuts including “Lovesong,” “Lullaby” and “Pictures of You,” the band placed freshly songs. “Slumber When I’m Dead,” a guitar-heavy number with an nigh “Kiss Me, Candy kiss Me, Kiss Me” Middle Eastern arrangement, was a world premiere performance. “The Perfect Boy,” from the untitled 13th album slated for Sep, was Smith’s to the highest degree welfare, happy (note: happy is a relative term with this guy) tune since “In Between Years.”
If the depict remained a 1989 ocean with archipelagos of fresh songs, it would have been stellar. Just just an hour in, Joseph Smith would drop the next 20-some songs pilotage into the band’s before territorial dominion, a time when the radical pioneered primitive punk’s sublime-if-often-odd marriage to grand prog and psychedelica.
Classics including menacing, spacey-yet-skeletal “A Forest,” jazz-on-codeine “Sexual love Cats” and the song even Cure-haters will let in to loving “Only Like Heaven” shined. Even lesser compositions “Never Enough” and “C Years” were elevated railway to excellence subsequently exploding a sonic mushroom cloud cloud of reverb, reverberation and chorus.
Somewhere around the third encore, Smith had zilch left to prove. Only he still blasted into “Boys Don’t Cry” and a birthday suit and bloody “Killing an Arab” for commodity mensuration.
So let’s get over the lipstick hangups. Recall how ridiculous Bono looked dressed as Mephisto? Remember Bowie and Freddie Mercury and Jacques Louis David Lee Roth and Prince in skin-tight leotards? Let’s lastly pull up stakes looks aside and give the Cure its due. The ring invented a bunch of what made ’80s music work.
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