I get this feeling I'm in motion.

Why does Wild Mood Swings suck so bad?

I take it as given that it does. I mean, I'm not going to play that "yeah, sure, it's bad for the Cure, but 'bad for the Cure' is really good by the standards of any other band" game. That album sucks. It's crappy. No further inquiry on that point is required.

The question is: "Why?"

And it can't just be because 'the songs are worse'. That's obvious. It's also no more illuminating to say that 'the songwriting is not up to snuff'. That's just another way of saying that 'the songs are worse'. I mean, I could see what they were trying to do. They weren't going for an all-dark-all-introspective type work, a la Disintegration or Faith. Seems to me they were going for something along the lines of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me or Head on the Door. So that rules out one possible explanation for WMS's crappyness. It can't be because there's a mixture of upbeat, happy songs with the more prototypically Cure-esque tunes. Because KMKMKM and HOTD are all really quite good. 3KM competes for their best ever.

It also can't be because the upbeat tunes on WMS are more unadulteratedly happy than the songs on 3KM or HOTD. I mean, well all know that "Why Can't I Be You???" is not really a 'happy' song, after all. And the more upbeat songs on a lot of the other records, Wish for example, contain a hint of anger. Listen to "Doing the Unstuck": "It's a perfect day to throw back your head/and kiss it all good-bye". Even "Friday I'm in Love": "I don't care if Monday's black/Tuesday, Wednesday heart attack". Still melancholy. "Mint Car" and "Return", however, diverge from this. "The sun is up, I'm so happy I could scream/and there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be", for fuck's sake! I mean, this is genuinely happy stuff! There could be a banjo playing the backing parts!

But that can't be the reason. Why? Because even the sad songs on WMS are shitty. (I use the terms 'happy and 'sad' with full awareness that they're not unproblematic categories; I take it that most people who have at least a passing awareness of the Cure's corpus know roughly which songs I'm talking about when I use those terms. "Just Like Heaven": happy. "100 Years": sad.) "Jupiter Crash", "This is a Lie" are both awful. The latter especially. Even the best song on the record, "Want" is not up to their standard album-openers, even the later ones like "Out of this World" and "Lost".

Perhaps a bit of history might help us. WMS was recorded right after a major personnel change: Boris Williams, Porl Thompson out; Roger O'Donnell, Jason Cooper in. Might we blame the newbies? Not so fast: Roger O'Donnell had a huge role to play on Disintegration, their best, by most people's reckoning (I'm not so sure about that, but it's definitely one of their best). And that lineup went on to recover nicely with Bloodflowers and their eponymous last record. I mean, the last two aren't quite up to W or D, but they're still rather good. In any event, the presence of O'Donnell and Cooper couldn't be the explanation. The Cure has endured many many lineup changes with compelling results.

I think, rather, the explanation lies with the songwriting on the record. Specifically, the songs lack the same boldness found on their classic records. The same reckless abandon, or whatever that means. You know what I'm talking about. There's a sense in "The Kiss" that the band might just run completely off the rails. That sense reappears throughout KMKMKM: "Hot! Hot! Hot!" anyone? That sense also comes back on W (Wish for those of you who haven't been following along with my abbreviation scheme). Not so on WMS. But how to put your finger on courage? How to quantify it? Listen to the songs on the record: many of them have almost exactly the same structure. The sound is also pared down. Here, I think, we can take a potshot at O'Donnell. On D, he uses sweeping pads, huge, layered keyboard voices. Not so on WMS: he uses either single voice instruments or noises that approximate classic keyboards (such as the Hammond B-3) without filling the spectrum in the same way he did on D. You might respond: yeah, but didn't W almost lose the keyboards completely? And that record certainly fills up the spectrum!

Here, I think, we should point to the absence of Porl Thompson. His guitar work on W does the same thing that the keyboards on D and KMKMKM do: they create a wall of sound that the band then uses and that Smith sort of wraps his vocals in, like a warm blanket. Lyrical missteps are excused, because the rhythm and sound of the vocals perfectly complement the sound of the backing voices. On WMS, if Smith has a slightly cheesy lyric, there isn't anything in the music to pick him up. Too much of the burden of making the song interesting lies with the lyrics. And that's the true anomaly - never before have Cure songs relied on the lyrics to create interest in the song. The lyrics are almost always very good, quite compelling. But they were always gravy. The music almost always is compelling enough on its own to carry the song with or without the lyrics.

And, let's face it, the lyrics on WMS are not up to this challenge. I don't have any other explanation for this other than their cheesiness, topics that are either cliched or uninteresting. Luckily this was a one time (or slightly more than one time) thing.

Why am I broaching this topic? Oh, I dunno. I came across the CD when I was loading my iPod the other night, and thought to myself: you know, I used to think this record sucked. Given my recent maturation and whatnot, maybe it's better than I remember. Nope. Still crappy. And that's too bad.