“You gotta have faith.”
Who knew that George Michael‘s 1987 chart smash was actually written about his love of the band’s third album, a theme he would continue on the same record’s ‘I Want Your Sex‘, on which he would wax lyrical on the merits of Pornography?
George was right though – you gotta have faith. More so than Seventeen Seconds, there’s a strong case for arguing that Faith is the bridge between the debut’s brand of slightly gloomy pop and Pornography’s harder-hitting aural assault before becoming a fully-fledged ‘pop’ singles band in 1983 with ‘The Love Cats‘ and ‘The Caterpillar‘.
Nobody really saw that coming. Sure, there was a glimpse of Robert Smith‘s commercial songwriting chops on 1979’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry‘, but Faith was the album that espoused darkness like no other up to that point and saw them firmly ensconced as champions amongst the goth crowd for the foreseeable future at that point.
The odd thing about it though is that Faith is actually a very beautiful record. It is arresting and hypnotic in a similar way that one by The Fall is.
‘The Holy Hour‘, which opens the album, for instance, features repetitive rhythms and basslines – let’s face it, you’d be pushing it to call it in any way ‘catchy’ – yet its monotonic incantations are beguiling and irresistible, giving way to the persuasive driving beat of the addictive ‘Primary‘, undoubtedly one of the standout tunes of the band’s early slew of full-lengths.
‘All Cats Are Grey‘ is arguably the pinnacle of Faith, a strange warmth exuding from its pores like a precursor to the shoegaze scene a few years later. Lie on the bed and listen to its hushed tones, and it takes you to another world entirely, a grainy vision of a Utopian society perhaps, a dream world most definitely, the palate-cleansing chills of Smith’s bleak, wintry guitar providing an almost out-of-body experience to the listener.
Despite the overridingly sombre tone of the set, punctuated still further by the curtain closing title track, a glance at the lyrics tells you that this is not the wrist-slitting exercise that many purported it to be. Take ‘Other Voices‘ as a case in point. The first verse runs: “Whisper your name in an empty room / You brush past my skin as soft as fur/ Taking hold, I taste your scent / Distant noises, other voices.” And this is how The Cure have always been – impossibly romantic, with a clever knack for shrouding it in cloaks of seemingly palpable anguish.
Faith is simply a magnificent record that paved the way for what I believe is their masterpiece – Pornography. But more of that later.
