Saturday, November 14, 2015

How The Cure reshaped goth rock on "Disintegration"


New Record Bin article at Nooga takes a look back at 'Disintegration'. Here's an excerpt:

"Disintegration" was released May 2, 1989, and would forever change the way people looked at and responded to The Cure. Once this record came out, for better or worse, people would gauge this aesthetic by its attention to or delineation from the sounds of this specific album. Whereas their previous few records were steeped in pop distraction, "Disintegration" was a return to the dark, dense sounds of their early '80s work. This was a new chapter in goth rock's storied lineage, and The Cure was determined that the genre would again have the emotional potential that it once had before it became something of a cultural stereotype.

These songs are bottomless, filled with cocooning rhythms and the band's trademark opulence. But there isn't a sense that they were trying to reclaim some of their former glory. They were taking the experiences and inspirations from those earlier records and reconditioning them into a subverting take on the goth rock mentality. And besides being a callback to the sounds of their prior releases, "Disintegration" is arguably the band's greatest accomplishment—it is the sound of a band remembering why they loved making music in the first place.

Read the rest at Nooga.

Public onsales Friday & Saturday


If you missed out on the presales, or want to try and upgrade your seats, public onsales for most of the shows start Friday, Nov. 13th, at 10 am local times. Miami, Denver, and Kansas City go on sale Saturday, Nov. 14th, at 10 am local times.


On sale Saturday Nov. 14th

June 26th - Miami, FL at Bayfront Park Amphitheater
Ticket link (on sale at 10 am Eastern)

June 8th - Kansas City, MO at Starlight Theatre
Ticket link (on sale at 10 am Central)
If you're having trouble with the website, call +1 (816) 363-7827 for tickets.Thanks @jess_and_tonic!

June 5th - Denver, CO at Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre
Ticket link (on sale at 10 am Mountain)



On sale Nov. 13th at 10 am Eastern

June 22nd - Columbia, MD at Merriweather Post Pavilion
Ticket link

June 24th - Atlanta, GA at Aarons Amphitheater Lakewood
Ticket link


On sale Nov. 13th at 10 am Central

May 13th - Austin, TX at Frank Erwin Center
Ticket link


On sale Nov. 13th at 10 am Mountain

May 17th - El Paso, TX at Don Haskins Center
Ticket Link

June 3rd - Salt Lake City, UT at Maverik Center
Ticket link


On sale Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific

May 19th - Las Vegas, NV at The Chelsea Theater at The Cosmopolitan
Ticket link

May 20th - Chula Vista, CA at Sleep Train Amphitheater
Ticket link

May 26th - Mountain View, CA at Shoreline Amphitheatre
Ticket link

Friday, November 13, 2015

Kansas City presale

June 8th - Kansas City, MO at Starlight Theatre
On Sale: Nov. 14th at 10 am Central
Presale on Nov. 13th at 10 am Central
Tickets range from $25 - $95
Codes: TRACKS, PHOTO
Presale ticket link

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Lol at San Diego Music Thing on Friday

Go see Lol at the San Diego Music Thing on Friday, Nov. 13th, at 1:15 PM. He'll be part of this panel on touring:

ON THE ROAD AGAIN - REVENUE STREAMS FOR TOURING MUSICIANS• 1:15 pm
Every kid in a garage has dreamed of it, but how does a band actually go on tour? Learn how to pay for your tour and get the lowdown on alternative revenue streams for touring bands.
Panelists Include: Mike Merriman, PARR3; Andy Altman, GigTown; Brad Lee, Tour Manager; Lol Tolhurst, The Cure; Tim Mays, The Casbah.

Presales this week


Will post all presale codes as soon as I have them. If you get any that are not listed, please let us know. Thanks! Will update with any new presales and info as it gets released.


Today Nov. 12th

June 22nd - Columbia, MD at Merriweather Post Pavilion
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Eastern
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Eastern
Tickets range from $40 - $80
Code: heaven
Presale ticket link


June 24th - Atlanta, GA at Aarons Amphitheater Lakewood
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Eastern
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Eastern
Tickets range from $25 - $100
Codes: THECUREINATLANTA, thecure2016, THECURE
Presale ticket link


June 26th - Miami, FL at Bayfront Park Amphitheater
On Sale: Nov. 14th at 10 am Eastern
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Eastern
Tickets range from $25 - $125
Live Nation presale code: TRACKS
Live Nation Mobile App code: COVERT
Presale Ticket Link


May 13th - Austin, TX at Frank Erwin Center
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Central
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Central
Codes: THECUREATX, PICTURESOFYOU, LOVESONG, FRIDAYIMINLOVE
Presale ticket link


June 5th - Denver, CO at Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre
On Sale: Nov. 14th at 10 am Mountain
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Mountain
Tickets range from $25 - $75
Codes: itsFriday, iminlove
Presale ticket link


May 17th - El Paso, TX at Don Haskins Center
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Mountain
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Mountain
Tickets range from $19.25 - $60.25
Code: THECUREINELPASO
Presale ticket link


May 26th - Mountain View, CA at Shoreline Amphitheatre
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Pacific
Tickets range from $? - $107
Codes: lovesong, TRACKS
Presale ticket link 


May 19th - Las Vegas, NV at The Chelsea Theater at The Cosmopolitan
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific
Identity Membership Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Pacific
Tickets range from $50 - $125
Code: CURELV
Presale ticket link 


Nov. 11th presales end tonight

June 3rd - Salt Lake City, UT at Maverik Center
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Mountain
Presale on Nov. 11th at 10 am Mountain
RESERVED MAIN FLOOR $58.00 - $48.00
RESERVED LOWER BOWL $58.00 - $38.00
RESERVED UPPER BOWL $28.00
Code: MAVCURE
Presale ticket link


May 20th - Chula Vista, CA at Sleep Train Amphitheater
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific
Presale on Nov. 11th at 10 am Pacific
Tickets range from $32 - $82
Live Nation code: TRACKS
Live Nation Mobile App code: COVERT
Other codes: thecure2016 / FM949
Presale ticket link
 

The Cure - 10 of the Best

Great list from The Guardian:

1. 10.15 Saturday Night
Miserable sorts looking to knock the Cure often crow over how erratic they can be. I can see their point: there certainly aren’t many other bands I can think of that bob so wildly from masterpiece to medicority. They’ve released some of my favourite ever albums – records I wish could be hidden in time capsules so that future citizens of Earth will hear them and hopefully feel the same way they made me feel. And they’ve made others which have been disappointing enough for me to wish Viking-style burials upon; a fleet of fiery CDs drifting in the ocean that can no longer trouble my ears. A tattered copy of Disintegration, a present from my older brother, is one of my prized possessions. On the other hand, my dad gave me a copy of 4.13 Dream shortly before he told me he’d been having an affair and was leaving home; I’m still more resentful about being saddled with 4.13 Dream.

But who cares about consistency? The Cure have always been guided by their restlessness, and it’s led them to many moments of greatness. It also means that, because they’re so changeable, they have more than one way of being brilliant. On their 1979 debut Three Imaginary Boys, for example, they’re still a post-punk band, coming on like Wire with smudged make-up, courtesy of cold, razor-like guitars and poppyish melodies. Opener 10.15 Saturday Night nails the nervy horror of sitting by a phone that never rings, with Robert Smith’s heavy fretting exacerbated by the irritating “drip drip drip drip” of a leaky tap. “I’m wondering where she’s been / And I’m crying for yesterday,” he bellyaches, before he’s drowned out by a needling, nagging riff.

2. A Forest
Smith wasn’t particularly taken with Three Imaginary Boys. The band’s label, Fiction, had the final say on its tracklisting and artwork, and it didn’t sound right either. “I didn’t even like it at the time,” he admitted. “There were criticisms made that it was very lightweight, and I thought they were justified.” Far more interesting was the sound being made by touring partners Siouxsie and the Banshees, for whom Smith would moonlight as a guitarist. But with their second album, Seventeen Seconds, the Cure made their first sprawl into smothering gothic rock. And no track on the album feels more like it’s been cursed by dark magic than A Forest. Smith has since backpedalled on the story that it was inspired by a dream he’d had as a little boy about being lost in the woods, but there is still something about it that feels like a twisted fairy tale: the organ’s ghoulish murmur, the ghostly guitars, the sudden flashes of synthesiser. “Suddenly I stop, but I know it’s too late,” pants a scared-sounding Smith. “I’m lost in a forest, all alone.” You’ll feel just as uneasy as him.

3. The Drowning Man
There has always been a literary bent to the Cure’s work: their controversial debut single Killing an Arab, for example, tapped into Albert Camus’s existentialist novella The Stranger. Smith used his bookcase for inspiration on their brilliantly melancholic third album, Faith, too, this time lifting from Mervyn Peake’s fantasy series Gormenghast. The Drowning Man’s spooky rattle is inspired by the fateful plight of Lady Fuschia Groan, who is devastated to discover that her lover, the sneaky Steerpike, is responsible for killing her father. Overcome with grief, she is perched on a windowsill when a knock on the door startles her into banging her head on the ledge and drowning. The scene is brought to life with one of the Cure’s murkiest scores, all icy splashes of noise and the hiss of snaky guitars as Smith sings her down into the watery depths: “One by one her senses die / The memories fade and leave her eyes.” He pinches and tweaks lines from Peake’s prose, too. “Everything was true / It couldn’t be a story,” he sings at one point, echoing the heartbreaking moment when Fuschia realises the evidence is overwhelming, and her betrothed is a scumbag. The truth doesn’t set her free; it is the beginning of the end.

4. One Hundred Years
Has there ever been a more terrifying start to an album than this? Listen, now, to Pornography’s desolate opener One Hundred Years, and you’ll be convinced that some spectacular storm is brewing. “It doesn’t matter if we all die!” yelps a crazed Smith as black clouds gather above, over dry clattering drums and the shrill howl of guitars. Smith has often referred to Poronography as the first instalment in a trilogy of albums that also includes Disintegration and 2000’s Bloodflowers. It’s a canny idea, but it’s possible, too, to regard it as the finale in some dread triptych that starts with Seventeen Seconds, gathers misanthropic pace with Faith and culminates here, with the Cure at their most magnificently bleak. “Stroking your hair as the patriots are shot!” barks Smith, like he’s being forced to watch gruesome images of violence à la A Clockwork Orange. “Fighting for freedom on television / Sharing the world with slaughtered pigs!” The terror doesn’t stop there, either. “The ribbon tightens around my throat / I open my mouth and my head burst open,” he yells, a rush of noise wailing dementedly behind him, before concluding: “We die one after the other / Over and over.” A song thick with frenzied fear that’s made for the end of days.

5. A Strange Day
Pornography, according to Smith, was supposed to be the “ultimate ‘fuck off’ record”, an album so unremittingly harrowing that the Cure would never be able to follow it. It certainly proved too upsetting for some. Rolling Stone, for example, memorably declared it: “the aural equivalent of a bad toothache. It isn’t the pain that irks, it’s the persistent dullness.” Think of A Strange Day, then, as some hellish hallucination brought on by the gas given to you in the dentist’s chair: the moment when Smith peers far into the future and brings back dreadful tales of the world’s end. It’s a few minutes of eerie calm among the ugly din of Pornography, with its sick, churning synthesiser and sidewinding guitar. But its subtlety doesn’t make it any less scary. In fact, it’s creepier, to hear Smith so disturbingly peaceful about what he’s seen. “Give me your eyes that I might see the blind man kissing my hands,” he sings serenely, making like a feverish Colonel Kurtz. “The sun is humming / My head turns to dust as he plays on his knees.” The horror, the horror.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

More dates announced for the 2016 tour!


From the official site:

"The Cure will be playing 27 shows in 22 North America cities next Spring, their first major tour of the continent since 2008.

During the past 7 years the band has performed a number of 'Reflections' shows in LA and NYC, and headlined most of the major festivals, including Coachella, Lollapalooza, Bottlerock, Osheaga, two Austin City Limits, three Riots and a Voodoo...

"THE CURE TOUR 2016" will present Robert Smith (voice/guitar), Simon Gallup (bass), Jason Cooper (drums), Roger O'Donnell (keys) and Reeves Gabrels (guitar) as they explore 37 years of Cure songs, mixing hits, rarities, favourites and as yet unreleased tracks in a brand new stage production that promises to be the 'must see' show of the year!

Support on all dates will be The Twilight Sad.


May 11th - New Orleans, LA
On-sale and show info announced soon

May 13th - Austin, TX at Frank Erwin Center
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Central
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Central

May 14th - Houston, TX
On-sale and show info announced soon

May 15th - Dallas, TX
On-sale and show info announced soon

May 17th - El Paso, TX at Don Haskins Center
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Mountain
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Mountain.
Tickets range from $19.25 - $60.25

May 19th - Las Vegas, NV at The Chelsea Theater at The Cosmopolitan
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Pacific.
Tickets range from $50 - $125

May 20th - Chula Vista, CA at Sleep Train Amphitheater
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific
Presale on Nov. 11th at 10 am Pacific
Tickets range from $32 - $82

May 22nd, 23rd, 24th - Los Angeles, CA at The Hollywood Bowl
Sold Out!

May 26th - Mountain View, CA at Shoreline Amphitheatre
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Pacific
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Pacific
Tickets range from $? - $107

May 31st - Vancouver, BC at Festival Lawn at Deer Lake Park
On Sale: Nov. 27th
Tickets are $57

June 3rd - Salt Lake City, UT at Maverik Center
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Mountain
Presale on Nov. 11th at 10 am Mountain
RESERVED MAIN FLOOR $58.00 - $48.00
RESERVED LOWER BOWL $58.00 - $38.00
RESERVED UPPER BOWL $28.00

June 5th - Denver, CO at Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre
On Sale: Nov. 14th at 10 am Mountain
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Mountain
Tickets range from $25 - $75

June 8th - Kansas City, MO at Starlight Theatre
On Sale:Nov. 14th at 10 am Central
Tickets range from $25 - $95 

June 10th & 11th - Chicago, Il at U.I.C Pavilion
10th is Sold Out!

June 12th or 13th - Toronto, ON
On-sale and show info announced soon

June 14th - Montreal, QC at Bell Centre
On Sale: Nov. 27th at 10 am Eastern

June 16th - Boston, MA
On-sale and show info announced soon

June 18th, 19th, 20th - NYC, NY at Madison Square Garden
18th & 19th are Sold Out! 

June 22nd - Columbia, MD at Merriweather Post Pavilion
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Eastern
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Eastern
Tickets range from $40 - $80

June 24th - Atlanta, GA at Aarons Amphitheater Lakewood
On Sale: Nov. 13th at 10 am Eastern
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Eastern
Tickets range from $25 - $100

June 26th - Miami, FL at Bayfront Park Amphitheater
On Sale: Nov. 14th at 10 am Eastern
Presale on Nov. 12th at 10 am Eastern.
Tickets range from $25 - $125

NB.
There will also be a Seattle, WA performance...
On-sale and show info announced soon"

Pure speculation on my part, but looks like that Seattle show could be at Sasquatch Festival, as the schedule is open between May 26th - 31st, and Sasquatch runs May 27th - 30th.

Articles about this: Gibson, NOLA, Examiner, San Diego Union Tribune, Music Times, Audio Ink Radio, Gambit, Mashable, NOLA Defender, KFOX14, Chron, San Antonio Current, NME, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Diffuser, Contra Costa Times, Kansas City Star, Dallas Observer, KVIA, Under the Radar, Consequence of Sound, Brooklyn Vegan, Exclaim!, DIY, Pitchfork , Read Junk, Vanyaland