Everything you need to know about the Cure's best record is summed up in its opening line: "It doesn't matter if we all die." Relentlessly bleak and almost perversely nihilistic, Pornography is a disembodied wail in a 2am cemetery, the last missive from a ghost ship before it disappears into the black. There aren't words adequate enough to encompass the undistilled, bloodshot horror in the bent-metal riff that powers "One Hundred Years." The songs that follow only deepen the misery of that opening salvo. And what a salvo! "Just a piece of new meat in a clean room," Smith wails near the song's conclusion, "A hundred years of blood, crimson / the ribbon tightens 'round my throat."

Throughout, Smith's lyrics are pure horror-show: "One more day like today and I'll kill you"; "Eyes like ice don't move, screaming at the moon"; "A charcoal face bites my hand/ derange and disengage everything." The bleakness of his mood is matched by the menace of the music: The title track opens with sickening, backwards-looped speech before cracking open the cabinet of Dr. Caligari and letting the dead-eyed demon loose; the horrific cello line groaning beneath the bottom of "Cold" essentially invented the spirit —… read more »