Music Mondays: "How Beautiful You Are" by The Cure

"I turned to look at you to read my thoughts upon your face, and gazed so deep into your eyes, so beautiful and strange, until you spoke and showed me understanding is a dream." -- The Cure



Somehow, I have allowed more than a year to go by without featuring a song by The Cure. I listen to them so much that I think I hold myself back from posting them because I don't want to overdo it. I'm correcting that right now.

This song was inspired by a Baudelaire poem, which makes it dark sexy, sad sexy, all that stuff. But you already knew that, since this is The Cure we're talking about.

Every time I hear this song, I get an ache in my chest.

Music Mondays: "Not In Love" by Crystal Castles featuring Robert Smith

"We were lovers--now we can't be friends. Fascination ends. Here we go again."

Take nostalgic lyrics, add frantic, desperate electronic music, and then think who might be the best possible person to perform the vocals. If you guessed The Cure's Robert Smith, you have the right answer. The result? A sexy anthem of denial, longing, and obsession.

Music Mondays: "Fascination Street" by The Cure

"Yeah, I like you in that like I like you to scream, but if you open your mouth then I can't be responsible for quite what goes in or to care what comes out." -- The Cure

I want to quote every lyric of The Cure's stylishly sleazy "Fascination Street," which so clearly evokes the mood of a relationship that's over but hasn't ended yet. Even though the narrator's no longer in love, he and his lover are still caught in a sexual spell that's holding them together long after they should have let each other go. Robert Smith's impassioned lyrics have an edge of vulgarity that makes the song both hot and despairing.

If this amazing bass line doesn't make you want to grab your doomed love and "move to the beat like we know that it's over," then I don't know what will.