Needle Time

  The Cure - Disintegration [FIXH 14 EU 1989 24-Bit 176.4kHz FLAC] Appreciated by many, including myself as their best album since Pornography as well as an antidote to their Lovecats and Caterpillar period, The Cure's eighth delivered enough gloomy bedroom gothica to entertain even their most intense fans, but also just enough pop-melodies for their newer fans. Some say this record is The Cure doing what The Cure do best, whereas others say Disintegration is just Robert Smith broadening his goth clichés to reach a wider audience. There is no doubt that Disintegration is a gloomy album, however by squeezing almost an hour of music onto two sides of vinyl, it needed a lot of tinkering when the lacquers were cut. The ideal length of a vinyl record at 33rpm is no more than forty minutes, therefore you can understand how the label's demand for a single record affected the vinyl mastering choices. Consequently, this record is cut very quietly ....and therefore a vinyl ripper...

  The Cure - Three Imaginary Boys [FIX 1 UK 1979 FLAC] Two more old Cure rips debuting on Needle Time. As a musical artifact this is an important album despite it's muddy sound, it is The Cure as a new-wave band finding their way in rock'n'roll and the elements of what made The Cure sound are at a formative moment, especially Smith's Fender riffs which where to be key across the first three records. Original bassist Mike Dempsey moved on after this album and it was his successor, Simon Gallup's chugging deep bass which defined the subsequent gloomy period. This is a reworked and cleaned up version of my ESWA 2.0 post from July 2017. A1  10:15 Saturday Night A2  Accuracy A3  Grinding Halt A4  Another Day A5  Object A6  Subway Song B1  Foxy Lady B2  Meathook B3  So What? B4  Fire In Cairo B5  It's Not You B6  Three Imaginary Boys B7  The Weedy Burton The Cure - Boys Don't Cry [SPELP 26 UK 1983 24-Bit FLAC] The US versi...

  The Cure - Seventeen Seconds [FIX 004 UK 1980 24-Bit FLAC] According to the descriptions on Discogs, my copies of Seventeen Seconds and Faith are first pressings. I certainly did not buy them as new so it is likely these came my way between '85 and '88 when I lived in the south of the UK and spent a huge chunk of my income on vinyl. Both albums marked a change in direction as the band made the transition from new-wave to gloomy-wave and I needed these records more than their more popular mid-eighties releases. To be honest, this is a bloody miserable record. I would assume that you all are likely to have one (or two) of the many versions/releases/reissues of this album somewhere in your own collection, either as a physical real item, or in a digital format so I won't go into lengthy descriptive prose. In this world of digital remastering and audio manipulation, here is an original album ripped to high resolution with very minimal de-clicking....or any other ham-fisted...

The Cure - Pornography [FIXD 7 UK 1982 24-Bit FLAC] Here's a reasonably clean rip from my original UK pressing of The Cure's darkest work. Save for a few tiny pops and some immedicable crackle this came out fairly well given the amount of play/abuse over the years. Likely the album which inspired many a euro-darkwave band, Pornography features one of my very favourite Gallup/Smith/Tolhurst compositions, the dreary but delightful A Strange Day . Vinyl is likely the best media on which to listen to this album (it worries me to think of the audio consequences of a deluxe remaster edition on CD) so here is my best attempt at extracting high resolution audio from this thirty-eight year old slice of black plastic.  ESWA 2.0 members should know this is a revised version of my post to that forum back in in May 2017. I've been fiddling with iZoptope to improve some of the flaws in audio with that upload. Enjoy. A1  One Hundred Years A2  A Short Term Effect A3...

The Cure - Faith [FIX 6 UK 1981 24-Bit FLAC] Faith was the second in The Cure's trilogy of gloomy albums which culminated in the powerful and dark Pornography in 1982. The hit single Primary features and is easily the stand out, although Gallup's bass on Other Voices  makes it a personal fave. This is a complex record, it's overall mood and textured rich layers of sounds hold the listener in a state of melancholic doom! The Cure had moved on from Boys Don't Cry, consequently  Faith is an album which feels very sorry for itself. The UK cassette version came with a bonus album Carnage Visors . I don't have the cassette tape but  do feature a CD rip of this in the archive for completion. A1 The Holy Hour A2 Primary A3 Other Voices A4 All Cats Are Grey B1 The Funeral Party B2 Doubt B3 The Drowning Man B4 Faith

The Cure - In Between Days [0-66882 US 1985 24-Bit] After the superb first four albums I began to lose interest as the original line-up had disintegrated and the back-combed one began to dabble in pop. This single was a brief chink of light (with a very familiar riff) after a few dodgy singles and then I could not find much more to like until the Disintegration album. This US pressing was always a bit of a holy grail at the time as the extended mix was never available in the UK, until of course, one or two savvy record retailers began importing them. I have the UK pressing too, but that is for another day.  A1 In Between Days B1 In Between Days (Extended Version) B2 Stop Dead