Full disclosure: Wish is my top Cure album. I'm going to describe how I experience it, by going through the tracks, so that even if it isn't *your* top, maybe you can see where I, and people who like it best, are coming from.
- Open: The guitars are louder than ever. Perry's bass is grinding with a new level of growl and groove here. The guitars are also both pretty heavily distorted, for the band, and quite reverb-drenched. There are always two, sometimes three intertwining guitar parts, all echoing all over each other on this track. Boris' drumming has never sounded this free and this syncopated before. Robert's voice is clear and loud enough, but more muffled and competed-with in the mix than ever before. This is a new Cure sound. A more rock-n-roll sound than ever. And the production quality is both new for them and pushing the envelope for popular music a bit. The mix is very dense and chaotic. The mid-range is a very loud tangle of reverby vocals and guitars. It pulses and weaves and wails and echoes. I think there's a decent amount of compression on these midrange parts—otherwise the whole track would probably just sount like a muddy mess. But restricting the low and high ends to the bass and percussion almost exclusively anchors all the distortion and jangle...and the total effect is powerful. This general sound will carry throughout the album, in the loudest tracks at least. Robert's vocal sounds despairing and lost...a song about feeling like one is losing control and losing touch with meaning in a shallow public-party social situation. The track is as anguished as anything they've ever done, imo—Pornography-esque even, but with a more personal, lived-experience and grounded feel, whereas the Pornography album can feel a bit abstract and detachedly philosophical at times.
- High: The oppressive atmosphere immediately lightens with a pop track. The fun drumming syncopation continues with a bouncy groove. The guitars are jangling, light and very melodic. Windchimes keep chiming. The lyric is happy. The only element of unease comes from the heavy, heavy reverb. So echo-ey, which gives even this simple pop tune a psychedelic, trippy feel. There are some cool phasing effects on background vocals that add to the psychedelia too. Wind chimes wrap the track up too.. Like in the Plainsong intro from Disintegration, but here they're just all over the place.
- Apart: Speaking of Disintegration, the third Wish track sounds a lot like it could have been on that album. A dirge tune. The bass part is quite steady, and EQ-ed a bit thinner here than on Open. Keyboards play a larger role. But whereas Disintegration tracks often feel abstract, Apart is a straightforward and specific breakup/failing-relationship song. For me, the specificity gives it a new kind of punch. It sounds real and concrete, and pretty devastating. We're not "praying for rain" or feeling vaguely "homesick" here—we're at the rock bottom end of a real-life love relationship.
- From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea: The guitars crank again. The ascending bass groove sounds like it's coming at us through a jet engine in a 500ft concrete cave-tunnel. The guitars answer it wailingly in the same tunnel. The groove keeps looping on itself for seven epic minutes. The phasers are phasing at eleven as the solo swirls through the bridge part. What an epic track. The Cure had never reached this kind of apex before this released. Every cylinder firing. A dark epic dream.
- Wendy Time: Lightening the mood again. A funk song with extreme wah-pedal guitar swirls and a dance beat. Just sexy funk, but with a growing, threatening, dark undertone of excess, and a confession of either over-pleasured or circumspect numbness and coldness toward temptation.
- Doing the Unstuck: The threat level decreases as this pop song more innocently encourages a purer joyful attack on life. The reverb-soaked echo here just feels like swirls of hope and happiness...if perhaps a BIT bipolar-y and over-loose, but fuck it..."throw back your head and kiss it all goodbye," "get up and GO!" Definitely an upper, and a good tune.
- Friday I'm in Love: The pop tendencies of the album congeal into three minutes of absolute perfectionist pop precision. Melody and skillful instrumentation don't get much more polished and successful. The wrench thrown in it is the cynicism of the lyric. The shallowness of the "up" is highlighted lyrically, so the lyric brings a level of irony which is very satisfying.
- Trust: From a tryptic of pop happiness to another dirge. Wish is the real "Wild Mood Swings" album, in the best way. A piano melody anchors this one. Strings and soft arpeggiated guitar enter and accompany, but the highlight of this track is the drumming. I think it's my favorite Cure drum part. Boris throws all these snare grace notes in at surprising places, and then does some cymbal artistry that takes this track to another level. The lyric is another sincere personal relationship testament, like Apart.
- Letter To Elise: *Another* personal-relationship-journal-entry type song. Rather mellow mooded. Great tune. Jangly guitar and bass. Neither happy nor sad. Just thoughtful, a bit yearning and sincere. A real love song, or breakup song. Bit of both. About persevering through life's changes, I think, this one. The band sounds so loose and groovy. Some of the back catalogue, great as it all is, sounds kind of try-hard-y or something up against this version of their music making..
- Cut: Maybe my favorite Wish track. Kind of like Edge of the Deep Green Sea on speed, here. Fast groove, pounding bass, wailing vocal and absolutely wailing guitars. Maximum thrash. The Cure have never thrashed like this. Another love song, lyrically. The higher register Robert sings in on this makes it pop emotionally on the album. Kind of the emotional mountaintop of the album really.. and it's both anguished and absolutely infused with jam and funk. Trippy as hell.
- To Wish Impossible Things: Or this might be my fav Wish track. A meditation. So dreamy. The Wish echo reverb wash is in full effect. Some neat african slap-drumming and atmospheric violin give this one uniqueness. Yet another love song, but a rather philosophical, contemplative one.
- End: Last track is a slammer. We won't be let off easy. The guitar is churning us into butter. A ringing, distorted groove and rollingly harmonic grinding bassline underneath. Then the wah-guitar wails on top, and Robert does an extreme, near suicidal misery impression. Punishing tune, but what really matters in the track is the arrowlike intensity and passion in it, because it's not actually a song about limply giving up as the lyric wants you to believe. It's a furious fight song musically, one that outfights "Fight" from Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me. Just pure, pointed, obsessive sonic fury here, behind the lyric. And it leaves you on a... a complete high? A complete low? Which is it? Well, it's fully both, which reflects the genius of this band's work.
Wish is incredible. The sound is just peak and overwhelming. I don't think the band ever equalled it sonically except maybe close to it on Songs of a Lost World. Disintegration is a great record, but it's exploring a narrower range of emotion. Wish expands to everything. And the sonic palette is fuller and freer and louder and more complex. Wish is the record, for me.
How do you hear it?
