The Cure – Anniversary : You can’t go to Heaven unless you’re dead
by Niki N. Phaser on Jun.21, 2009, under Non-Single Masterpieces
I am sad to say and maybe some of you are sad to admit that The Cure’s previous album, The Cure (2004), should have been their last. It was one of those rare cases when a collection of new material is as good as the band’s best of. It had everything, from catchy poppy singles, like The End of the World and Taking Off to pain-filled poems like Lost and The Promise. The agent of their ever present dark side is a track called Anniversary and it could be described as One Hundred Years in slow-motion. It’s filled with the Cure-like phaser effects and delayed piano keys and echoes in some apocaliptic distance. It grows and grows and you just get tangled in all the sounds as if in a spider web (you get the reference, right?). We could almost call it music as a fit of some disease that causes amnesia. The lyrics are as ambiguous as ever when Robert Smith is in his dark moods. You never really know if the woman he’s talking to is alive or dead. The beginning of each verse with the line “A year ago today/tonight” doesn’t offer to much hope for the first option. The end, “I never let you go”, suggests a feeling of not moving on… Anyway, it’s not really about words with this one, it’s about the atmosphere. The music is uplifting, yes, but more in the “my spirit is going to Heaven because I’m dead” sense of the word.
