Disintegration

CMJ - Included in CMJ's list of "Top 25 College Radio Albums of All Time" CMJ - Ranked #1 in CMJ's "Top 20 Most-Played Albums of 1989" Entertainment Weekly - "[T]his album of ultra-romantic synth dirges broke goths' cold hearts and became the Cure's biggest record." -- Grade: A Mojo - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[A] work of tragic, ineffable beauty....[With] a sound of frosty, slo-mo grandeur, constructed around boomy drumming, flanged guitar and magisterial synths." Rolling Stone - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he album's tension between masochistic experiment and big pop still blazes." Pitchfork - "It's a single, grand, dense, continual, epic trip into core stuff the Cure did well." Billboard - "The nuances that Robert Smith and David M. Allen lent the final production -- warm tones, balanced tempos, cascading guitars -- saved the album's comforting gloom from becoming innocuous." Paste - "DISINTEGRATION is less a collection of epically needy songs and more the distillation of a specific feeling..." Paste - "It's lush, mournful and gorgeous -- in other words, it's Robert Smith and company at their very best."

Dark, dreamlike and magical, Disintegration surely represents one of the Cure's finest hours. Although retaining the darkest elements of the earlier albums, it pointed the way towards the band's later, more commercial work on Wish. The intoxicating music draws the listener inexorably downwards, but somehow one remains buoyant - rarely since this album has Robert Smith surpassed the beauty and yearning of 'Pictures Of You', or the poignant pop of 'Love Song'. The nightmarish 'Lullaby', however, increases the pressure, and by the final tracks, all hope quite literally disintegrates. A unique and emotionally raw album, Disintegration evokes the sensation of inevitable, but desirable, death by drowning.|