10 Best Albums By The Cure to Own on Vinyl

With all their success, it’s still difficult to describe the Cure to the uninitiated. To say ‘goth rock’ is just lazy and wrong. That won’t explain why fans range between moody teenagers, art-school graduates, and middle-aged yuppies, and it won’t explain songs like “The Love Cats.” Like a chameleon, bandleader and founder Robert Smith has taken the band from its post-punk minimalist beginnings to drug-fueled sturm and drang, eccentric synth-filled detours, psychedelic spirals, and dizzying dream pop. Then the band does it again for good measure. They’re rock, goth, punk, pop, and psychedelic disco with a fluid lineup that drops to one or balloons to six. The one constant is the only original member currently in the band: Robert Smith himself. Poet, cartoon, artist, and guitar hero, he’s the French-poetry-reading offspring of Nick Drake, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd in lipstick.

Dabbling in various bands as a teenager, Smith formed Easy Cure in 1977 in Crawley, England which later changed to the Cure and the lineup was pared down to a three-piece with Smith on guitar, Michael Dempsey on bass, and Lol Tolhurst on drums. Their debut, Three Imaginary Boys (1979) is an uneven affair but there are some gems, just as there are on the next twelve studio albums and the many compilations and live albums. And these gems aren’t necessarily the singles. The non-single album cuts are some of their most defining songs and get the loudest cheers when played at shows. You need to sit down and listen to whole albums to understand that. From claustrophobic nightmares to sweeping dreamscapes, there’s a little something for everyone. A die-hard Cure fan will say you need to own them all but here are 10 albums you really should spend time with.

Read the rest at Vinyl Me Please.