Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me: Desire in every direction
The Cure’s great double album is excessive, romantic, abrasive and alive—the catalogue at its most gloriously plural.
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me does not ask to be streamlined. Its eighteen tracks are the point: a catalogue of appetites, tempers and textures that refuses the idea that The Cure must choose between pop band and dark institution. The opening title track is all scorched guitar and barely contained fury; within minutes “Catch” is offering one of the lightest melodies Robert Smith ever wrote. The distance between them defines the album’s freedom.
Inside the record
That range keeps producing unlikely peaks. “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” moves with dreamlike ritual, while “The Snakepit” sinks into a long psychedelic coil. “Why Can’t I Be You?” and “Hot Hot Hot!!!” are shameless kinetic pop. Then comes “Just Like Heaven”, three and a half minutes in which arrangement, melody and emotional perspective align so perfectly that familiarity has done little to diminish it. Deeper in the sequence, “Like Cockatoos” and “A Thousand Hours” prove the album’s shadows are as carefully drawn as its singles.
There are moments when the scale blurs the impact, and a shorter record would be easier to defend track by track. It would also be less truthful. Desire here is excessive by nature—romantic, physical, jealous, euphoric—and the double-album form lets those states contradict one another. This is The Cure at full stretch, confident that identity can come from a sensibility rather than a consistent sound.