“According to the kids on South Park, this is the best album ever made. According to many depressive Eighties-minded kids, it’s the only album ever made.” RS It “is essentially a refinement of everything that preceded it.” TB “Expanding the latent arena rock sensibilities that peppered Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” AZ The Cure crafted “a pop album realized on an epic scale” AZ “with the crawling, darkly seductive Disintegration.” AZ “The Cure were operating at some kind of peak level right about this time in their history.” AD
“Cure musical trademarks, such as the lengthy introductions, are taken to glorious extremes here.” AD The album is “comprised almost entirely of epics like the soaring, icy Pictures of You” AMG and other “long mood pieces that develop slowly around the listener.” AZ “The lyrical focus is intensely personal throughout, and, with the exception of” AZ “the concise and utterly charming Love Song” AMG, “the mood is overwhelmingly dark and brooding.” AZ “This is exactly what Goths called romance in the ‘80s.” AD
Love Song
“The Cure’s gloomy soundscapes have rarely sounded so alluring, however, and the songs – from the pulsating, ominous Fascination Street” AMG – “a classic Cure track if ever there was one” AD – “to the eerie, string-laced Lullaby – have rarely been so well-constructed and memorable.” AMG “Robert Smith’s voice shakes like milk as he makes adolescent angst sound so wonderfully, wonderfully pretty.” RS “Here are songs of remembrance that, through their deep candor, transcend the individual level to explore universal longings and fears…Anyone who has experienced the joy and sorrow – especially the sorrow – of love will find his or her deepest sentiments, noble and petty alike, echoed poetically here.” AZ
Fascination Street
“It’s fitting that Disintegration was their commercial breakthrough, since, in many ways, the album is the culmination of all the musical directions the Cure were pursuing over the course of the ‘80s.” AMG “It scores over Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me slightly by sheer dint of its cohesion,” AD leaving the listener with an album “you can immerse yourself in.” AD
Awards:
- one of the top 1000 albums of all time
- Q Magazine’s Top 100 Albums of All Time
- one of the top 100 albums of the 1980s
Resources and Related Links:
- DMDB page for Disintegration
- The Cure’s DMDB Music Maker Encyclopedia entry
- AMG All Music Guide review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
- AZ Amazon.com review by Al Massa
- AD Adrian Denning
- RS Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
- TB Thunder Bay (2005). Albums: The Stories Behind 50 Years of Great Recordings. Thunder Bay Press; San Diego, CA. Page 249.
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