I've spilled a bunch of e-ink on the subject of 15-years worth of diversions on the path to hearing "Disintegration", but upon further thought, my record with ALL Cure albums is nothing to brag about. I didn't hear "Wish" in full until a few years after it's release. Despite seeing them live on the "Bloodflowers" tour, I have never heard the album. Compilations and live albums aside, the only other Cure album I own -- and have heard at all, for that matter -- is "Kiss Me x3".

Until this week, that is. Now I can add two others to the list: "Pornography" and "The Cure". The latter only came out a few weeks ago, now how's that for turning over a new leaf?

I hadn't planned to write anything about the former, but after hearing the new album, suddenly the two don't seem all that different. Almost nothing the Cure have done since "Pornography" can match the smothering, black, depressive cloud that it creates. But both albums sound so incredibly heavy -- the pounding drums, thick bass, messy and hazy guitars -- they're produced to sound more like metal albums than just about anything else in their catalogue. On the newest, thanks should be given to Russ Robinson. The press leading up to the release date intoned along the lines of "The Cure's latest self-titled effort is the fruit of a long-awaited collaboration with Ross Robinson", to which I self-intoned "who???" in response (I'm supposed to know who's been producing Korn's albums? As if). At first thought, a Cure album produced to sound like Korn appears disturbing, but producing something to sound like Korn isn't the same as, you know, actually sounding like Korn. Because laying down the heavy like this makes the Cure sound fantastic. The music thuds into the sternum. This is not the dreary goth music we grew up with, this is a snarling vicious beast of an album with Robert Smith wailing over it to help remind us that this really is a Cure album. "Pornography" isn't nearly this huge.

"Lost", the opener, vaguely recalls Smashing Pumpkins "Bodies", with its slow and steady build, balls-out conclusion, and a one-line chorus/mantra chanted throughout and screamed with crazed abandon by the end. "The End of the World", for reasons I can't explain, comes off miles better than I remember it from their Leno performance (its familiarity is the leading candidate to explain this). Overall, it's a blistering collection and Cure fans certainly needn't worry about making excuses for it (except for the cover, perhaps).