Wild Mood Swings
When Wild Mood Swings was released it was exiting there had been no new Cure albums in 4 years before Wish, excluding the two live albums Show and Paris from the Wish tour.
It was exciting time, the internet was a toddler and the Cure were embracing IRC (Internet Relay Chat) by starting their own chat server.
Wild Mood Swings was preceeded by the single The 13th. This was the best quality version of the video I could find.
I’ll come back to The 13th in a bit, but for now, let’s wander into Wild Mood Swings.
Want
“I’ve always wanted more, anything I haven’t got. Everything I want it all I just can’t stop…” Wild Mood Swings kicks of with a track that has a similar lyrical tone to ‘Never Enough’. Except Bob’s lamenting that he hasn’t got any more hope or time. It’s a good opener.
Club America
Wah wah frenzy! A song about people in nightclubs and the predictable game of trying to pull someone. I love playing the bass line along with this or going into a Wah Wah land with it.
This Is A Lie
Acoustic, string heavy plod through monogamy being a problem. It’s quite dreary and forgettable.
The 13th
The Cure trying something different, including a weird wobbleboard sound in the chorus. Upbeat, fun and atypical Cure.
Strange Attraction
Kooky keyboard sounds and sound effects lead us on a tale of a relationship maintained through letters.
I didn’t want to listen to this because I remembered thinking it was dreadful. On listening though it is a perky, upbeat little number, though I can see why I probably didn’t like it.
Mint Car
A good old Mint Car, bright upbeat, another great bass line. The video is a more “grown up” take on the Friday I’m In Love video and that’s no bad thing.
Weirdly around this time I was wandering IRC servers and wandered onto #thecure and there was only one other person there. I can’t remember their name, they were there to learn how to use IRC and they said they’d recently been in a music video where they were under a glass table.
They didn’t seem particularly chatty otherwise. There was due to be a chat session on the The Cure’s own IRC channel around that time. Did I encounter Bob? I’ve no idea, that person never re-appeared.
Jupiter Crash
A metaphor using the 1994 Shoemaker–Levy 9 comet crashing into Jupiter, with not bang but a whimper.
I doesn’t lyrically feel like a Cure song, it feels forced. Musically is a slow, quiet meandering track, but not particularly good. I don’t think I’ll be listening to this again in a hurry.
Round and Round and Round
A song about the musical merry-go-round of record promotion and touring and how Bob feels about it. It’s a not bad song, but like This Is A Lie, it’s just not memorable.
Gone!
The problem with jazz is that there is a horrific amount of “bad jazz” out there. I feel torn with Gone! It’s fun but I’m not sure I want to hear it.
Numb
I hear a sitar sound, it disappears and the acoustic guitar slinks in, and we get a dismal tale of someone who is a smackhead. It’s another Cure song that follows a familiar format of playing through a long instrumental verse before coming in with the lyrics. The same song format is used several times on this album: This Is A Lie, Jupiter Crash and probably Treasure and Bare as well. I think Bob was struggling for material.
Return
Bob’s getting kinky, fun with PVC. There’s something about the brass that keeps this perky and fun. Controversially it is my favourite track from this album.
Trap
Bob’s trapped in a relationship and feeling resentful and feels he is getting the blamed for/harangued constantly. This is a distant reminder of ‘Cut’ from Wish.
Treasure
It’s a song about a child with a terminal condition. I feel bad saying thing, but The Cure took ‘To Wish Impossible Things’ and shat all over it. I really can’t stand this song, I’ve never taken to it.
Bare
Another tale of a disintegrating relationship, the acoustic guitars and strings, sounds like musical bastardisation of ‘To Wish Impossible Things’. I would happily never hear this again.
Background To The Album
Wild Mood Swings was that they’d lost Porl/Pearl on guitar, Boris the drummer had left and Perry moved from additional guitars and keyboards and took over full time guitar duties. Roger was drafted back in on keyboards, after he left after the Disintegration tour.
During the writing/recording of Wild Mood Swings, they were auditioning drummers, seven of them, one of whom was Martin Gilkes of The Wonder Stuff (since the stuffies had split in 1994, before reforming at the end of the 90s/early 2000s).
Wild Mood Swings seems an apt name, it’s all over the place. I seem to reading Robert was struggling with the lyrics for the album. I went off googling and came across this: In 2004 Robert said the following to Rolling Stone.
When we came back to do Wild Mood Swings, I got that sense of fun back. And it shows in the album; there are some pretty demented songs on there. But it was a shame, because it got slagged when it came out. Fans hated it as well. It’s the only time I’ve been hugely disappointed.
I suppose it was because “The 13th” – with this sort of crackpot salsa feel – was the first thing that they’d heard from the band in years, and I don’t think they gave it a chance after that. Every album up to that point had sold more than the last one, and suddenly the record company was confronted with this horrifying drop in sales, and they didn’t have a fuckin’ clue as to why we’d ever sold records in the first place. That sort of stymied any attempts at a promotion campaign, because they didn’t really know what they were promoting or who to.
The album suffers from being too long. And it’s disjointed. I was trying to write in different styles, and wanted us to sound like different bands, almost going after the Kiss Me idea. But, because we’d lost Boris, and before Jason [Cooper] settled in, we had a different drummer every week. I would often forget the name of the person who was drumming.
Robert also said in another interview…
Although I think it’s a good record, I don’t look at it as a Cure album. It’s difficult to explain what I mean by that, it’s rather intuitively what I say.
On the subject of lyrics he had this to say…
The biggest difference in “Wild Mood Swings” and all the other albums is even a lot of the first-person songs are not me. I’ve been observing people a lot more. And there’s a lot of bad stuff that goes on without me having to be the focus of it. There’s also a degree of what I presume is still called “poetic license,” which people kind of miss. If I only wrote about what I really did, there would be very little subject matter. I mean, I do do a lot of things that, I suppose are out of the ordinarily, particularly when we’re on tour. But a lot of the songs are make-believe, just my way of entering a fantasy world. Because I am really happy.
Summary
The album was conceived and recorded during a bit of turmoil for the band, and knowing this the results aren’t that surprising. Many of the tracks don’t stand out, they feel more like a half arsed b-side that no one wants ot hear.
Personally I think you could make a decent 6 track EP of Want, Club America, The 13th, Strange Attraction, Mint Car and Return. The rest of it I can easily live without.
Honourable Mention
On the Japanese version of this album ‘It Used To Be Me’ was included, which featured for the rest of us as a b-side to ‘The 13th’. It’s difficult to know why it wasn’t included. Have a listen and discover for yourself.
