Robert Smith’s guitar gently weeps over a lonely piano. Welcome to Seventeen Seconds. This unsettling instrumental sets the mood for the next 35 minutes, 40 seconds. Deliberately disjointed, the fear factor is heightened towards the end by a harrowing, almost indecipherable, moan… Whatever it is, or is intended to be, the sound will chill you to the bone. Continue reading The Cure – Seventeen Seconds

Shadowy gloom has haunted The Cure since the release of 1980’s Seventeen Seconds. Robert Smith curated an atmosphere that was otherworldly and unsettling, yet curiously comforting. Over the next 40 years, the band wrote some of the most effervescent pop songs ever recorded, yet the mood established here, as Dan Biggane discovers, is one they would ultimately return to again and again… Continue reading The Making of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds

On their third release, the Pixies unleashed a sublime album, one that transformed them from darlings of the underground rock press to mainstream chart success. As Neil Crossley explains, it was a transition that saw them emerge with their raw, abrasive spirit still intact… Sift through the welter of adjectives employed by music writers over the decades and certain ones appear with alarming regularity. ‘Visceral’ … Continue reading Pixies – Doolittle