Feature Dvd - Trilogy
The Age
Friday August 8, 2003
DVD review: Trilogy The Cure (Warner Vision) (223 minutes) Exempt ***?
For a guy who announced himself with one of rock's most pointedly minimalist debut records, Robert Smith sure has an epic sensibility about his art. The Trilogy concept - three entire Cure albums played live, in order, with production values that would embarrass your average Olympic Games opening committee - is one that Gene Simmons might stick in his ``A Bit Much" tray. In fact, Smith says during the 35-minute band interview included here, he borrowed the idea from David Bowie, who reconstructed Low and Heathen on stage in New York last year. But even Bowie never made a record as relentlessly doom-laden and despairing as Pornography, Disintegration or Bloodflowers, and it's their linked atmospheres of pathological gloom that provide the backbone of Trilogy. Thus, the closest you'll get to Love Cats here is Pictures of You, Lovesong or Lullaby, all from 1989's Disintegration, the relatively feel-good phase of an intense, three-hour-plus experience. Pornography (1982) is the show's most harrowing third. From its venomous opening line, ``It doesn't matter if we all die", it's performed with its unique, hypnotic sombreness intact, despite a light show that Berlin - Trilogy's lucky city of choice - probably hadn't seen since WWII. ``See you in seven years," Smith quips at the end of Act 1, flashing his first smile. Next up, Disintegration is also played note and mood-perfect, Smith and longstanding cohorts Simon Gallup and Roger O'Donnell apparently unfazed by the Ultravox-y synth sounds that make it sound more dated than its predecessor. Smith's enraged 40th birthday card to himself, Bloodflowers (2000), is a more dynamic and bilious course still, the late sweetness of The Last Day of Summer offering timely respite, to say the least. Two encores from Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987) make no attempt to lighten the bottomless gloom, which is, after all, the point of this exercise. For all its esoteric appeal, Trilogy is an impressive artistic statement exploring the act, as Smith puts it, of ``going to the edge of the precipice and jumping off". It's a universal, if usually unspoken compulsion that he and his latest band (Perry Bamonte and Jason Cooper complete the quintet) pursue with compelling intensity; magnificently lit and captured by some edgy and inventive camera work. If nothing else, it's the end of an era for the Cure, writ humungously large. So what's next, Bob? Only ``the heaviest album anyone's ever made in the history of music". Bloody perfectionist. -- Michael Dwyer
F: 2 x DVD9 A: Dolby Digital 5.1 V: 16:9
© 2003 The Age
