As if some macabre folly cast Vincent Price instead of Jeremy Irons in "Brideshead Revisited", or some sinister senility chose Tobe Hooper to direct a series of Jeeves, "Love Cats" is a post-modernist’s dream of a nightmare, a purrrfectly corny example of the past purrrceived impurrrfectly, the flaw maliciously irritated and then put to use. In this purposeful madness, the last of The Cure’s "fun" single trilogy, Robert Smith’s imagination is squirming proof that, through TV, radio and most especially video, the past now plays as active a part in the present as the present itself, revitalized through easily available images, ravaged out of its rituals and roles and reinterpreted as a malleable source of fractured associations.
"Love Cats" is Smith’s masterpiece of disorientation, a mental collage of history unhinged. Herman Munster takes spiked tea with Jean Cocteau while a taxidermist twitches the net curtains in anticipation of a cannibal feast. But how to praise something so zany? How to approach its kaleidoscopic approaches? Well, at a pinch its psychedelic cocktail jazz, a strychnined nursery rhyme where every allusion (illusion!) triggers off a tunnel of flashbacks, but it’s so much sillier than that.
Sing the slap-dish chorus, swoon to that devil-may-care decadent swing. Single of the week? Single of the year(s)!
