The Kiss is perhaps the darkest song I've every heard, and is the first one on this album I fell in love with. Like Cockatoos has that bass line that mingles with your blood. If Only Tonight We Could Sleep is so unique and strange that it almost redefines what music is. It's nearly narrative. And Just Like Heaven, as somebody else said in another review, really is the perfect pop song.

The Cure has metamorphosed more times that other bands have albums, but Robert Smith's melancholic voice has always been there, droning about misery or rejoicing in giddiness. This album, though currently not directly centered, serves as the perfect fulcrum to their incredible body of work.


Just like Heaven for fans of The Cure   January 15, 2003
 21 out of 21 found this review helpful

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is one of my favorite Cure albums. It's packed with great music and has a discernible atmosphere that distinguishes it from most other alternative music. The Cure was a big part of my teenaged years, and this music sounds as good today as it did back then. Just Like Heaven and Hot Hot Hot!!! are the two tracks most likely to be familiar to the uninitiated, the first song catching the group at one of their more mainstream (yet unique) moments and the latter proving that The Cure could appeal to a wider audience while remaining perfectly and distinctively themselves. My nod for best song on the album, though, would go to Why Can't I Be You? which is actually quite upbeat and danceable (if you're so inclined). This song is one of several that deliver a virtual cacophony of sound, including prominent horns against the familiar background sounds of the band. Catch, How Beautiful You Are, and The Perfect Girl have an infectious, ditty-like quality to them, breaking the music free from the clinging maudlin environment one expects to find front man Robert Smith in much of the time. Of course, melancholia exists among these tracks as well. If Only Tonight We Could Sleep is a slow, sentimental song which sounds wonderful until you get to One More Time, which outdoes it in poignancy. And then you get to A Thousand Hours; if ever a Cure song could be called beautiful, this is the one. Robert Smith says more in a few words than most singers do over the course of an entire album. When Smith sings "For how much longer can I howl into this wind, for how much longer can I cry like this?" I find myself quite moved every time; the vocals are raw and impassioned and seem to incorporate so much anxiety and angst into them that the overall effect is incredible. I don't want you to think that the guys went soft on this album, though: Torture is a release of pent-up feelings, Shiver and Shake tells it like it is, and the final track Fight energizes each past, former, or future Cure addict to be who you are and who you want to be regardless of what others may think of you.

You may actually want to look for the tape rather than the CD of this particular album. While the CD is quite long, extending well over an hour, the tape contains one track not included on the CD: Hey You. It's actually one of my favorite songs on the album, full of bounce and inspiration, even though it isn't very long in duration. There is really more variety to be found on this album than on most other Cure releases, and I think this is the best selection with which to introduce today's generation to the music we thirtysomethings indulged in during our youth. I would still have to name Disintegration as the group's best album, but I really believe Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me is their most appealing offering.


Great music, bad product.   December 9, 2002
 16 out of 21 found this review helpful

Many will tell you that this is The Cure's best album, and they are right. This CD, however, is just another example of Warner Brothers' thrifty laziness. WB as a record company has always had a bad reputation and this CD is one more reason why. First, there is a track missing from the original double vinyl set. You see, when this album was first released on CD back in 1990, they could fit only 74 minutes of music on them, so they had to cut one song. But now CD's can hold up to 80 minutes of audio, yet WB refuses to remaster this album. Fifteen years has gone by since these songs were recorded, and the sound could really use a good digital clean-up. Will WB ever do it? Probably not, unless we all flood WB's website with e-mails on this very subject...


I didn't think I'd like it....I was wrong.   June 7, 2001
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

If someone told me 15 years ago to listen to a Cure CD, I probably would have laughed in their face. At the time, I was listening to either hard-core metal, classic rock, punk, heavy industrial, or classical. The Cure, to me, was music that all the drama students at my high school listened to. Music for people who were overly sensitive "ar-teests" (artists) who brooded away too much of their teenage insecurities.

Flash forward seven years to 1993. I was taking summer school classes at college and was still listening (primarily) to the heavier brand of music, but my mind was open to other options at this point. One day while walking home from class, I heard "Just Like Heaven" on the radio and could not get it out of my head. No matter where I went or what I was doing, I found myself singing that song.

I finally gave in and bought "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me". For the next 4 months, no other CD went into my CD player. I put this CD up there with "Dark Side of the Moon", in that you can't listen to just one song from the CD. You just have to put it in and listen to the whole thing straight through. It's a wonderful work of music. Soon, I turned all of my metal friends onto the CD. Eventually all of us became huge Cure fans, and then got into DM, and then The Smiths, and then New Order, and so on...

It was so wild that I missed this music when it first came out. If anyone is looking for a great CD to enter the world of The Cure, I can highly recommend this CD as a place to start. I can't say enough good things about it, and this is coming from someone who was VERY skeptical.

If any Cure fans reading this want to enter the metal world, just like I came into yours, try starting with "Black Sabbath" and "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, "Killers" and "Piece of Mind" by Iron Maiden, and for the more advanced get "Rust In Piece" and "Cryptic Writings" by Megadeth.


An eclectic collection that will quickly grow on you   May 15, 2000
 8 out of 9 found this review helpful

One of my first Cure albums, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it at first. This album is not as unified musically or thematically as say, Pornography and Disintegration, but it's a great example of The Cure doing punk/pop rock. Of course, Why Can't I Be You, Hot(3x) and Just Like Heaven are radio gold, but this album has much more to offer. Like Cockatoos sounds like something Led Zeppelin might have written; the violin in How Beautiful You Are (my personal favorite on this album) still leaves me in awe, and Catch is absolutely beautiful. The Perfect Girl is as giggly as Robert Smith gets, and it's perfectly followed two tracks later with Shiver and Shake, where the rock gets harder and the spirit more bitter. For a new fan, Galore would be your best bet, but buy Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me before you transition into the band's music from the early 80s (read: Faith, Pornography, 17 Seconds). This album lacks the depth of those albums (and frankly, most of the others as well), but the range is startling on this album that launched the Cure onto a trajectory that made them so popular when they released Disintegration. This is the best Cure album for new fans who have exhausted the Greatest Hits collections.