Customer Reviews

Disintegration

5 star:		(196)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Cure are not my favourite band, though they surely are up there, but this is hands-down my favourite album of all time. Why? As a young adult in the post-CD age of downloading tracks, this opus struck me over the head and left me wading in melancholy, ecstasy, humility, delight. I heard this album for the first time leaving my apartment in Montreal to go to a cafe and study, grabbed the first CD of my roommate's sitting on the counter. I remember that day so clearly: I was totally hungover and foggy-headed, and it was one of those magical late-March gloomy, rainy, drizzly Montreal Saturday afternoons on rue Laurier. From about a minute into 'Plainsong' I was rapt: "Sometimes you make me feel like I'm living at the edge of the world/Like I'm living at the edge of the world.' I spent the rest of the day stumbling around the city in my Converse sneakers finding some hazy lucidity in my stupour, incredulous to discover that Plainsong merely introduced an hour of equally jarring material.

Robert Smith has said he made _Disintegration_ to express his sense of growing, well, disintegration- losing the purity of adolesence and sense of stable self which all of us can relate to. But ironically, listening to this album is the perfect Cure to such existential woes. All of a sudden, all of your breakups, gloomy depression, and unfulfilled desires are like stars in Smith's shattering-glass, reverberating, lugubrious dreamworld where people fall to their knees in prayer for rain, fall in love in deep murky waters, and dance with spidermen on candy-stripe legs. Luscious and life-changing.

A miracle of an album. Robert and the boys manage to encompass the whole spectrum of The Cure's eclectic sound on one recording, and the whole thing flows with beauty, precision and grace.
Any of you kids out there jumping on the Hot Topic goth bandwagon should do yourself a favour and pick this up. Screw all those bands like My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte et al. This is goth pop-rock in its true form. And unlike the afformentioned bands, this will be an album that people are actually listening to 25 years from now.

Merci beaucoup, envoie rapide et bon emballage. Item en excellent état. Il ne faut pas hésiter à faire confiance à ce vendeur. C'est apprécié.

excellent album of the 80s. great sad mood, nostalgic, entering a world of magic from a cool era.

From glorious glittering beginning to utterly spent finish, Disintegration is a masterpiece and a cleansing medataion. The listener participates in the decorated journey through the landscape of inner sorrows, fears, anger, wonderings, forloren-ness, love and pain, til the darkness enshrowds us in it's soft, dusty comfort and we understand that even after that many tears, that much darkness, we go on, we embrace it and we are comforted. The Cure, indeed. Disintegration is precious and beautiful. The heavy rain, the etherial windchimes, the mournful accordian, the splashing symbals, the rumbling bass, the heartfelt voice of our fellow thoughtful one Mr. Smith, the shades of blue and black, the black lace, the cobwebs, the incence. Poetry in sound (and cover art) that goes straight to the soul and comes out as inspiration.

I purchased a copy of this album on vinyl in 1990 and used it to soothe my soul after a particularly difficult breakup with a girlfriend of mine. For a year I did nothing but listen to this album (along with Joy Division) and it really helped me get through some tough times. "Pictures of You" has got to be one of the most powerful and sad songs ever.

I hadn't listened to it in over 12 years when I bought a used copy of the CD recently - and to my surprise I found that it was as moody, beautiful and wonderful as ever. It hasn't aged at all. This is one of those CDs you can put on in your player and just hit replay forever. It really took me back to a time in my life where I was going through a lot of hurt - and it still has a restorative and theraputic power that amazes me.

As novelists and poets may know, if your aim is to write something that will cause tears well up in the eyes of readers, you must be crying as you write every word. The emotional power and pain in this album may very well cause a tightening in the back of an attentive listener's throat. Easily respected as a great album in the popular musical canon, this album is, quite easily, my favourite album released by a popular musical artist.
The album opens within a windswept tunnel of heartache and love, with, "Plainsong" musing about the morbid beauty in a girl whose candle of life has been blown out, and who embraces with love and smiles at the thought of her death and emotional drowning. This beggining track segues into the single, "Pictures of You," of equally depressing substance, as we are reminded memories are the only permanence with the passing of time. "Closedown" is a poignant track in which Robert Smith wails in painful desire to feel love that isn't frought with human vice. "Lovesong" needs no formal introduction, being one of the most successful Cure singles worldwide. I attribute the success of this eerily touching, and appropriately named track, to its simplicity. It is Robert Smith's way of simply and directly saying, "I love you". "Last Dance" is a track about the waning enchantment in life as it progresses and we grow older. "Lullaby" is a haunting proto-Gothic classic, singing of the infamous "candy-striped leg" spiderman coming and eating dear Robert, who feels like a fly caught in a sticky web of gloom. "Fascination Street" offers a second-to-none baseline, and some of the catchiest guitar music on the album. "Prayers for Rain" is a song of the bleakest perfection one can achieve, Robert buries you alive in a catacomb of doom and gloom with this track. "The Same Deep Water as You" has a title that is quite self-explaining; despair, love, drowning in tears, with wails loudly and sonorously echoing in a dark cave of hope. "Disintegration" is a beautiful track, poetically splattering Robert's tears of insatiable desire onto canvass of lost hope. He beautifully sings, "I miss the kiss of teachery, the shameless kiss of vanity, the soft and the black and the velvety, tight up against the side of me/ and mouth and eyes and heart all bleed and run in thickening streams of greed..." This track segues into, "Homesick," an interconnected meditation on drugs fulfilling an emptiness and subduing the heartbreaking "home"sickness: or an allusion to those things, desires, needs, we put off in our lives... opting instead to never face them with the aid of emotional dillution. The depressingly beautiful album ends in a way that feels and sounds like an upbeat, bittersweet sort of death, completing the feeling of sinking, as though in a warm dark sea, gradually embracing it, and smiling as you accept your emotional drowning.

Disintegration is by far the most haunting and evocative album ever released by The Cure, and is probably the most haunting and evocative album ever released, period.

Disintegration is also the greatest work in The Cure's long and distinguished career. The album is a masterpiece of melancholy lyrics and music woven seamlessly into a sonic journey into darkness and forlorn hope.

"Plainsong" is the first track on the album, and is a promise of what's to come. Incredible synthetic sounds mix with a haunting guitar riff and ethereal vocals to make an unforgettable opening track.

"Pictures of You" has to be one of the greatest songs written by any band, let alone The Cure. The track is a seamless integration of the traditional Cure sonic "loop", where each instrument begins separately leading to a unified trademark sound. Smith's lyrics top the track, and lead us into welcome territory.

"Closedown" continues the melancholy theme of the album, and serves as a nice to segue into "Love Song", a track that is a throwback to "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me", and breaks the dark structure of the album, albeit briefly, with it's upbeat sound and lyrics. A good track that does at times seem very out of place when compared to the much more darker theme of the album as a whole. A great track nonetheless that provides a refreshing change in tempo.

"Last Dance" is a dark track that evokes the last goodbye, and the accompanying feelings of pain and desperation that come with it.

"Lullaby" combines that trademark Cure quirkiness with an interesting musical arrangement and quite dark & gothic lyrics. There is a definite feeling of morose humor popping up in this track, and does not have the same forlorn feeling of the majority of the album.

"Fascination Street" is by far the heaviest track on the album, masterfully layered with a throbbing base riff, chaotic guitars, and superb vocals by Smith. One of the best tracks on an album filled with more than its share of memorable ones.

We now come to the heart of darkness on the album. The next to tracks provide a sonic journey into a hopeless landscape, haunting beyond anything The Cure has done previously. "Prayers for Rain", a very raw and dark track, sets up what I truly believe is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written....

"Same Deep Water As You" for some reason gripped me the first moment I heard it, and in the 15 years since Disintegration has been released, has never let go. One of the most beautiful and haunting tracks that you could ever hear, yet it weaves sadness, love & loss into a seamless whole. A true masterpiece.

"Disintegration" picks up the tempo. In a way, quite welcome given the last few tracks. A very good track, if not outstanding.

"Homesick" is probably the weakest track on the album. Not memorable, but ok.

We end with "Untitled", which is probably my fourth favorite track on the album. A nice arrangement accompanied by very good songwriting. "Happy Melancholy" is the only way to describe this track, and is a perfect way to close the album, as it's not too dark, yet not upbeat either, giving quite a neutral ending to a truly great album.

Disintegration is one of those gems that in so many ways will stay timeless for years to come. By far The Cure's most popular album, it however does not a have a commercial sound in any way, with one off tracks that do not fit the structure (except maybe for "Love Song"). A masterpiece that should be in any music collection.

You can feel how heavy this album is from the first track to the last one. Songs like "disintegration" and "homesick" shows how dark and intense Cure music can be. Listening to it, you can feel your soul freezing and all the coldness inside these songs.

This is a Great Album. I'm not into this kind of music but I recognize the quality of his. Guess what. In the Avril Lavinge page for her album "Under my Skin"some guy that gave her one star recommended The Cure. And those that give that crap 5 stars (That don't know The Cure) are saying the The Cure sucks. Please go and give your two pennies by writting a 1star review to Lavinge. Bye