5/12/1979 Sounds
Three Imaginary Boys *****
The Recipe: take three intelligent, sheepishly good-looking, nice middle-class boys who have a flair for original, stylish music and who don’t mind leaving their souls in the hands of a fourth streamlined highly successful party. Take this latter party’s financial genius, add a pinch of wry, good-natured self-studying humor and here in one lavish package you have... The Cure.
On ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ the recipe belongs to that essential fourth Cure, producer, mentor, minder, keeper. Chris Parry. Parry’s the undoubted epicenter of The Cure, the Onassis, Mertis, and only sometimes the Basquo’s ghost of this boy’s band, the figure that walks and provides the ostensibly decadent, Dark Side Of The Moonish packaging gimmicks (dumb postcard and all) that furnish and inevitably and intruigingly both demigrate the album and perversely enhance its cheaper charms. The cover portrays a lamp, fridge and hoover, which if really serving as personality symbols of the Cure trio provides a witty metaphor.
However, packaging is packaging: if it affects or despoils the music or the band’s expressionistic, aesthetic approach it’s the tit tat of disaster. As it happens, on ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ the treatment and approach of the songs are so strong and of such amity that they aren’t’ put downs by the decadence. ‘Three Imaginary Boys’, fridge and all, is a powerful album.
The Cure (Lol Tolhurst: drums, Michael Dempsey: bass, Robert Smith: guitar and vocals) are unique in that they are ploughing a path of ‘different’, off-center music...
