The Cure Album: “Faith (Deluxe Edition) [Digipak]”

Sleek. Streamlined. Minimalist. Incredibly beautiful and surprisingly varied. Faith manages to capture the Cure at their creative peak. From start to finish, this album is nothing short of perfection. The words and vocals, the music, the production and engineering - they all fall right into place. Nearly all these songs can be considered Cure classics ( for the fans of the band who prefer the darker, more serious Cure to the upbeat, more pop oriented side). Primary. Other Voices. The Funeral Party. And my personal favourite The Drowning Man. All incredible. This remastered and expanded edition sounds terrific as well, which is icing on the cake. The original cd issue on the Elektra label just didn't sound quite right. There was distortion in many of the basslines, and the keyboards sounded hollow and tinny. This version corrects those mastering mistakes. The synths are warm and rich in tone, and the highs and lows in the mix are much easier on the ear. Granted, the subject matter isn't exactly "upbeat" but the messages are important, and certainly open to interpretation. Listen to the final, title track. The last words - "there's nothing left but faith" - can be seen as a sign of defeat or of hope, depending on how it is taken. The extras on the bonus disc are a revelation, tracking the evolution of the songs on Faith, from listening to the demos, the songs in their rawest form, to hearing the live versions, where they are performed with complete conviction, if not total technical proficiency. My favourite here has to be the often bootlegged, 10 minute version of the title cut "Faith" performed in Australia and originally featured on the b-side to the Charlotte Sometimes 12" single. "This is the last song it's called Faith" Robert says. Turn the volume up very loud and you can here one lone female scream, then the count-off "one, two, three, four" and the familiar beat kicks in, the mourful bassline, and Robert's signature guitar playing. This IS the Cure.

Often considered the middle of a trilogy of albums progressively darker in mood, "Faith" is an album about just that, about faith, or lack thereof. It is a stark, almost minimalist album, with Robert Smith handling keyboard as well as well as guitar duties and joined by bassist Simon Gallup and drummer Lol Tolhurst, the album is hushed, almost minimalist-- stretches where notes ring out over the light percussion background, there's little in the way of the ringing guitars that dominated the previous record, and the album is largely unaggressive in its presentation. This actually works quite to the strengths of Gallup and Tolhurst-- with the guitars and keyboards assuming a passive role, the bass is as aggressively voiced and Tolhurst's somewhat limited and minimalist technique match the music beautifully.

In fact, its a dark, funereal tone that drives the majority of this material, songs like "Holy Hour", "All Cats are Grey" and the bizarrely uplifting "The Funeral Party" don't rise in aggression above a sort of dark hazy swell, and even somewhat more aggressive pieces like the fantastic "Primary" and the title track maintain a despondent tone and a sort of hushed feel. The result is largely an album of delicate, fragile beauty, where the rare extroverted moments (the positively jangly "Doubt" and the much more aggressive "The Drowning Man") are somewhat shocking and almost out of place.

For this reissue, the remastering has, if anything added to the album a great deal-- while the record deals in hushed tones and quiet synths, there's no sense of fuzziness throughout the album courtesy of the crisp remastered sound. Again, the liner notes detail the creation of the album (in rather candid tone at that), and the reissue is filled with extra material-- the dark and bubbling (and seemingly endless at 27+ minutes) "Carnage Visors" and the great single "Charlotte Sometimes" are the gems this time around, with again a number of great live takes on material from the album and a series of demos that are interesting but ultimately unfulfilling on their own.

"Faith" is in many ways the musical equivalent of its cover-- a sort of grey album. It has a number of powerful moments, and while it can be a bit overwhelming due to its endlessly dark quality, it is a fine album. Recommended.

While `Seventeen Seconds' was dark, `Faith' is pitch black. `Seventeen Seconds' may have been sullen, but `Faith' is downright bleak. For all of that, it's also a slightly better album than its predecessor. Singer/songwriter Robert Smith was getting very good at expressing depression, even when it was painfully over wrought (I'm sorry, but every time I hear him singing about `crying at the funeral party', I have a perverse desire to laugh out loud). `Faith' was the perfect record to play if you felt incapable of crying but wanted to experience your depression anyway. It offers eight dirges, each one capturing a different nuance of catatonic pain. The naïve but appealing simplicity of "Boys Don't Cry" (their first album) is further expanded on here, but with some subtle and yet very significant changes. Words are boiled down to almost nothing, while the music provides atmospherics that fill in the moody blanks. For effect, somebody spent a hundred bucks on a flanger pedal, and quite obviously must have liked it, since it appears on virtually every song here, along with tons of echo and reverb.

For all of the atmospherics, though, the real mood setter is Robert Smith's voice; never in the history of recorded music has someone sounded so distracted, doleful, and depressed. He makes late-era Billy Holiday sound like Mary Poppins. I could be judgmental and claim that the album contains only eight songs due to a lack of songwriting ideas, but I think it is more due to the fact that they simply could not bring themselves to edit the chord progressions. Many songs build for over two minutes before vocals enter, but this only adds to the hypnotic appeal of the depressing themes. This utterly simple (or mind-numbingly redundant) game plan results in a record that is, for better or worse, extremely consistent in content, and in mood.

The extra disk (and extra track on disk one) is even creepier - and somehow even simpler in structure - than the main album. The audio quality for some of it sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom...underwater. Most tunes consist of a few repetitive, hypnotic chords, making time slow down like some musical version of Einstein's theory of relativity. "Carnage Visors" does this for thirty full minutes, with no vocal.

The fact is, you already know if you like the Cure or not. "Faith" captures them at a point in time when they completely abandon commercial acceptance and leap headlong into cult status. If you'd like to know where stylized gloom developed, then you've come to the right place. B Tom Ryan

Although heavy in topic the music of FAITH is marked with a sad beauty. Icy synth sounds feature heavily throughout and, combined with the machine-like pulse of Lol Tolhurst's drum kit, gives the music a fragile feel. Echo and reverb are treated on instruments and voices alike that linger over the music of FAITH like a heavy fog.

"All Cats Are Grey" is lyrically sparse, yet conveys greater emotion through it's lengthy instrumental passages. The superb "Other Voices" has a great bass riff (courtesy of Simon Gallup) and opens with one of Robert Smith's memorable anguished howls. Two of FAITH's songs disrupt the dark tranquility of the album with surprising jolts (one being the propulsive tempo of "A Primary" and the other the jarringly violent "Doubt"). "The Holy Hour" and "Faith" are also standouts.

FAITH is a four-star recording, but the latest repackaging of this fine album adds a bonus disc of largely forgettable material, and for this I feel I must subtract a star from the overall rating. Because B-side material from the Cure's singles was relegated to the

, that leaves out-takes (mostly uninteresting instrumentals), demo material (murkily recorded, skeletal versions of FAITH tracks), and live performances to fill the bonus CD. Still, there are a few treasures to be found here. The early version of "A Primary" that is revealed here is practically a new song in itself. The A-Side single "Charlotte Sometimes" is awkwardly tacked on at the very end, but is a welcome addition nonetheless. And immerse yourself in the extended live version of "Faith" if you want the lingering feeling of gloom to last a little longer.

If the bonus disc did not add to the sticker price of the final product then I wouldn't raise much fuss. I have nothing but praise for the Rhino label and the packaging for the Cure reissues is very impressive (lyrics, liner notes, and lots of photos including Robert Smith entering his trademark wild-hair and make-up persona). This reissue nicely summarizes the look and sound of this early period in the Cure's history. More surprises were yet to come.

A lot of the Cure's Deluxe Edition albums don't seem necessary unless you want to own every bit of music the band ever recorded, since the bonus discs are primarily live versions and early demos of familiar songs. (The b-sides were instead released on the "Join the Dots" box set.) This material is moderately interesting, but far from essential. In many cases, you would be fine just getting the single-disc remastered version of each album that was released after the Deluxe Edition at a fraction of the price. However, the Deluxe Edition of "Faith" is different. If you are a Cure fan, you should really consider getting it. First and foremost, disc 1 contains the 27 minute instrumental track "Carnage Visors" previously only available on the tape of "Concert." This is the ulimate Cure chill-out track, almost an album's worth of music in one song. While it is on disc 1, it is not included on the single-disc version of the remastered "Faith," so you have to get the Deluxe Edition to get it.

Much of the material on disc 2 of "Faith" I can give or take-- live versions and studio demos akin to the other Deluxe Edition albums. (That said, the instrumental demos fit well with the feel of "Carnage Visors.") But there are also some real gems. First off, you get the remastered version of "Charlotte Sometimes," a great Cure single not available in remastered form elsewhere. You also the fan-favorite live version of the song "Faith" from Australia that was a b-side to the original "Charlotte Sometimes" single, but was left off "Join the Dots.") You also get a version of "Forever," a fan-favorite rarity not previously available on cd. In all, the combination of "Carnage Visors" on disc 1 and a handful of particularly good rarities on disc 2 makes "Faith" the one essential Deluxe Edition album for most Cure fans.