102. cold

“Because sometimes passion isn’t hot at all, it’s cold, freezing even, and few have ever captured this as profoundly as The Cure on the album known as Pornography. Which showed up in my life just in time to find me edging back from a prolonged season in the abyss. I guess these days, you’d just say I was depressed. But nah, it was deeper than that, and colder, all that time lost in a void the size of Antarctica, knowing I could just lay down any old time and be gone, yet ultimately choosing not to. Like that Robert Frost poem about the snowy evening — still miles to go before I’d sleep. And there on the soundtrack of the movie I was only beginning to realize I was in, was Cold pounding home the truth that yes, in fact, I was very much on the gods’ straight and narrow path, which only appeared so crooked and convoluted because my filters were so f***ed up, the right music at the right time always being a good straightener.” (Philip Random)

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292. Hefner + Disney

In which T-Bone Burnett tells the lucid truth about the so-called American Dream by taking two of its two of its primary architects, definers of its fantasies, and switching their stories. So suddenly Walt Disney‘s the pornographer and Hugh Hefner‘s the guy we trust with our children’s imaginations, and everything makes a little more sense in a horrible sort of way. Found on a 1983 album that really should have been heard by the whole world. But it wasn’t. It’s almost as if some powerful villain in a magical mansion was pulling strings. 

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754. Hanging Garden

“Back in the day, I was known to argue loudly that Pornography was the only Cure album the world ever needed, a singular masterpiece of darkness, doom and fecund seaminess. But I was wrong. Because the Cure have certainly conquered other peaks, and sometimes Pornography does get a little murky. But Hanging Garden definitely rises above, all pounding rhythms and bleak forward motion, redolent indeed of 1982. The sleet heavy rains of eternal winter were falling hard, but still we struggled for the light.” (Philip Random)

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