God bless the boys from South Park. Kyle may have gotten it right. This album is epic. Before this record The Cure's music was underground club type music, and fit very nicely in the "post-punk" label. The music on this record has an incredibly beautiful melancholy to it. Most of the songs have a slow tempo and just ooze with a dark moodiness that makes you feel. I don't know that it can make everyone feel the same, but it will definitely make you feel.

The songs are a bit long, but that is not a bad thing as each is beautifully orchestrated. There is no filler in this record, and actually some of The Cure's best work is on this album. "Pictures Of You", "Love Song", "Lullaby", "Fascination Street", and "Prayers For Rain" are probably the best songs, but every song is incredible. Overall it's as bleak as any album I've ever heard, and it is painfully intimate. It's one I simply can't stop listening to, despite the dark melancholy of the music.

This is The Cure album for people that aren't even Cure fans. You don't have to be into moody, gothic, synthpop to appreciate just how great this record is. The album is nearly 12 years old, and doesn't sound dated at all. The material is still fresh, timeless. Enjoying this record is simply a beautiful experience.


The Very Last Thing Before I Go   November 15, 2003
 78 out of 85 found this review helpful

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard The Cure's "Pictures of You" in an advertisement for some camera or film on TV recently. But I did have to stop for a second to listen to this classic song. It brought back many memories and once again I had to pull out the CD and listen to "Disintegration," something I hadn't done for several years.
In 1989 when "Disintegration" was released I drove my family and friends nuts with multiple playings a day at home and in my car. What was it I was/am attracted to in this particular CD? The glorious sound of it of course, the voice (Robert Smith is a God), the lyrics, the general mood of despair and sadness for sure. But with all of that said, "Disintegration" is always hopeful, always "up." The Cure revels in their downtrodden and bleak view of life but they do it with a wink, a knowing smile and not a smirk; which pretty much says it all in regards to them and their music. And anyone familiar with their playful "Let's Go To Bed" has to agree: they're misanthropes with hope, if that makes any sense at all. The Cure are of the Light not of The Darkness.
"Disintegration" would definitely be on my list of CD's I'd have to take with me if I were sent to spend the rest of my days on a desert island, so that I could forever marvel at their wit, their attitude, their playfulness and their unrelenting spirit and drive to make this world a better place in which to live. I'd listen to "The Same Deep Waters as You" over and over, until I wasted away to nothing and returned to the earth from whence I had come.


Simply a Great Album   January 8, 2000
 33 out of 34 found this review helpful

Disintegration was the first Cure album I bought back in 1989 after hearing Fascination Street on the radio. I wasn't really into their music at all up until then, but I got home, put the tape into my stereo and from the opening seconds of Plainsong I knew that this was my favorite band in the world. They haven't let me down since. This album is musically incredible and lyrically fascinating. Many songs, such as Plainsong, Closedown and Untitled are awash in long, lush intros followed by Robert Smith's introspective lyrics, back into an extended outro. Quite simply, these songs move me. They are haunting, beautiful and captivating. These are some of the best lyrics put to music I've ever heard. In Untitled, Smith proclaims 'sometimes you make me feel like I'm living at the end of the world' 'It's just the way I smile, she said' is his response. I can't recommend this album enough. Many hail this album as among The Cure's best, which it is. It is also seen, quite rightly, as a pretty dark album in mood. But it's the lyrics and the music that raise the beauty of this album above its somber mood and make it a great addition to your music library.


Gloominess at its very best.   October 28, 2003
 20 out of 21 found this review helpful

It's hard to come up with anything to say about DISINTEGRATION that hasn't been said hundreds of times before. On this album the Cure take the dark mood of their "goth" period to a new level by expressing it in the context of pop music, resulting in a lush, emotional album that is as amazing for its accessability as its quality.

The Cure are able to keep the listener's interest through the soundscapes alone, never mind the irresistable melodies and the best lyrics of Robert Smith's career. The individual songs are stunning in their emotional impact, particularly "Fascination Street" and the jittery "Lullaby," but the whole of DISINTEGRATION is much, much greater than the sum of its parts. Listening to the songs out of context doesn't do this album justice; it begs to be heard in one sitting, with the volume turned way up (just like the liner notes tell you to do) to let the gloom wash over you. This is the best rainy day album in history, and I doubt it will ever be challenged.

Recommended for all fans of any kind of music.


Haunting Perfection   July 2, 2004
 16 out of 16 found this review helpful

As novelists and poets may know, if your aim is to write something that will cause tears to well up in the eyes of readers, you must be crying as you write every word. The emotional power and pain in this album may very well cause a tightening in the back of an attentive listener's throat. Easily respected as a great album in the popular musical canon, this album is, quite easily, my favourite album released by a popular musical artist.
The album opens within a windswept tunnel of heartache and love, with, "Plainsong" musing about the morbid beauty in a girl whose candle of life has been blown out, and who embraces with love and smiles at the thought of her death and emotional drowning. This beggining track segues into the single, "Pictures of You," of equally depressing substance, as we are reminded memories are the only permanence with the passing of time. "Closedown" is a poignant track in which Robert Smith wails in painful desire to feel love that isn't frought with human vice. "Lovesong" needs no formal introduction, being one of the most successful Cure singles worldwide. I attribute the success of this eerily touching, and appropriately named track, to its simplicity. It is Robert Smith's way of simply and directly saying, "I love you". "Last Dance" is a track about the waning enchantment in life as it progresses and we grow older. "Lullaby" is a haunting proto-Gothic classic, singing of the infamous "candy-striped leg[ged]" spiderman coming and eating dear Robert, who feels like a fly caught in a sticky web of gloom. "Fascination Street" offers a second-to-none baseline, and some of the catchiest guitar music on the album. "Prayers for Rain" is a song of the bleakest perfection one can achieve, Robert buries you alive in a catacomb of doom and gloom with this track. "The Same Deep Water as You" has a title that is quite self-explaining; despair, love, drowning in tears, with wails loudly and sonorously echoing in a dark cave of hope. "Disintegration" is a beautiful track, poetically splattering Robert's tears of insatiable desire onto canvass of lost hope. He beautifully sings, "I miss the kiss of teachery, the shameless kiss of vanity, the soft and the black and the velvety, tight up against the side of me/ and mouth and eyes and heart all bleed and run in thickening streams of greed..." This track segues into, "Homesick," an interconnected meditation on drugs fulfilling an emptiness and subduing the heartbreaking "home"sickness: or an allusion to those things, desires, needs, we put off in our lives... opting instead to never face them with the aid of emotional dillution. The depressingly beautiful album ends in a way that feels and sounds like an upbeat, bittersweet sort of death, completing the feeling of sinking, as though in a warm dark sea, gradually embracing it, and smiling as you accept your emotional drowning.