15. The Cure, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987)

Robert Smith had the whole history of the Cure in his head when he started writing songs for the band’s seventh studio album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Of course, as the mainstay creative force of the group that went through a fair amount of personnel churn during their preceding ten years of existence, Smith was the de facto keeper of the Cure’s institutional memory under all circumstances. In this instance, though, he’d gotten a recent refresher when assembling the singles compilation Standing on a Beach and its offshoots in the wake of the band’s greatest international commercial success to that point, the 1985 studio album The Head on the Door.

“When we were doing all the retrospective stuff last year, I sat down, got a few beers, and listened to everything we’d done from the beginning right through,” Robert Smith told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m sure that influenced the way the new record was put together. I was startled. Things I thought I’d like, I didn’t, and things I thought didn’t work were really good.”

The Head on the Door already represented a shift in the Cure’s sound, brightening up the goth gloom with a sharper pop sensibility. Enlivened by his upended perspective, Smith evidently felt he could take the reinvention even further. No musical instinct was off limits, and that creative largesse extended to the rest of the band. Following the lineup tumult of earlier years, the Cure felt notably settled with the group of musicians that made The Head on the Door and toured to support it: Smith, keyboardist Lol Tolhurst, guitarist and keyboardist Porl Thompson, bassist Simon Gallup, and drummer Boris Williams. Confident in the collective, Smith welcomed everyone’s input. For the first time, the whole band shared songwriting credit across a studio album.

“When it came to Kiss Me, we started off with a hundred bits of songs, because everybody contributed,” Tolhurst recalled to The Observer. “We all had home studios at that point. We said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get together and bring all our home demos from the last year or two and we’re going to play them for each other and score them out of ten. And the ones that get high marks, we’re gonna explore them further.'”

Clearly, a lot of the bits got high marks. Working with returning producer David M. Allen across two studios, in France and the Bahamas, the Cure generated somewhere around thirty-five songs. Because everything they generated was at an upper tier, the band was able to get only so far in their efforts to pare back what was included on the finished product. There was only one conclusion they could reach: Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me would be a double album.

Going to four sides was a daring move that paid off, mostly because the Cure really did have a wealth of strong material that showcased the breadth of their sonic palette. The album zigs and zags all over the place. “The Kiss” starts as off-kilter art rock that rivals the unbridled adventure of the Eurythmics, and then it swarms into a thick, acid rock freakout. “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” is spectral and raga-tinged, “Hey You!!!” is reconstructed surf rock with an appealing warble, and “Shiver and Shake” has a hard rock grind. “How Beautiful You Are” is leanly intense, and “Like Cockatoos” is textured and luxuriant. At times, it almost feels like the band is surprising themselves with what they’re pulling off, as on the jarringly fierce and intricate “Fight.”

There’s no masquerade going on, though. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is unmistakably the work of the Cure. The songs are often sweet and forlorn at the same time. They’re meticulously crafted and redolent with vivid details in both the music and lyrics. “Catch” is lithe, swingy, and woundingly romantic (“Yeah I know who you remind me of/ A girl I think I used to know/ Yeah I’d see her when the days got colder/ On those days when it felt like snow”doo doo doo “I know you remind of girl I think I used to know” song”), and “Hot Hot Hot!!!” is a jubilant dance track (“Yes, I’m jumping like a jumping jack/ I’m dancing, screaming, itching, squealing, fevered/ Feeling hot, hot, hot”). The latter is prime example of Smith’s fervent, inventive vocals transforming a cut from memorable to downright insinuating. Elsewhere, Smith’s calisthenic singing gives a rocket boost to the propulsive, wickedly clever “Why Can’t I Be You?” He deserves an award for his delivery of the word “delicious” alone.

“I’ve been criticized for being out of tune, but I always feel the emotive content of the voice is more important than the tune,” Smith told a reporter at the time. “I could sing something perfectly pitched and sound dreadfully insincere. I prefer to hear someone sing with genuine emotion and disregard the tune.”

There are loads of other winners on the album — the candy-coated distortion of “All I Want,” the tingly power ballad “One More Time,” the twisty “The Perfect Girl” — but the clear standout is “Just Like Heaven.” A vivacious pop song, the lyrics draw on Smith’s relatively new relationship with Mary Poole, who he would marry not too long afterward (the couple reached their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary just a few weeks ago). The history of rock ‘n’ roll is filled with lyrics that attempt to capture the flush of lovelorn infatuation, but few others do it as well as “Just Like Heaven”: “Spinning on that dizzy edge/ Kissed her face and kissed her head/ Dreamed of all the different ways/ I had to make her glow.” Released as a single, it became the Cure’s first Top 40 hit in the U.S., though just barely. Smith claimed he knew the song was special from the start.

“When I wrote it, I thought, ‘That’s it. I’ll never write something as good as this again,'” Smith told Rolling Stone more than three decades after the release of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. “I remember saying to the others in the studio, ‘That’s it. We might as well pack up.’ Thankfully, we didn’t.”

The Cure did indeed persist after Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. More than that, they reached new heights. Their next album, Disintegration, was an enormous critical and commercial success. The album racked up enough sales to reach double platinum status in the U.S., and its single “Lovesong” climbed all the way up to the runner-up position on the Billboard chart, blocked from the top by Janet Jackson’s monthlong run there with “Miss You Much.” The Cure just kept building on their already impressive history.

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.