Recently, in a fit of nostalgia, I popped the album Pornography into my CD player, and as I listened to Robert Smith’s tormented wailing, I began to muse on all things Cure-like.

You’ve got to love an album that starts with a line like, “It doesn’t matter if we all die.” In a different way, it’s as appealingly over-the-top as Nick Cave’s “I don’t believe in an interventionist God.” It makes me chuckle a bit now, but “back then”, as a sensitive 16-year-old, I felt those words with all my heart.

I discovered the Cure rather late in their career, long after Pornography was released. Disintegration was the first Cure album I ever bought, and it’s one of the few albums that I absolutely, wholeheartedly, unreservedly adored the very first time I heard it. I had bought the cassette (nobody had CDs back then), and I made a copy of it because I knew that I would wear out the original by listening to it so much.

I listened to it in my Walkman on the bus ride to school. I listened to it in the car when I was learning to drive. I listened to it in darkened rooms with incense and candles (I know, I know - but I was young). I listened to it at night as I drifted off to sleep. Though I hardly ever listen to it these days, I am still quite enamored of the dreamy, watery atmosphere of the album.

I have very distinct associations to go along with just about every Cure album I own. I remember buying Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and being shocked to hear the word “fucking" in a song. I remember getting Standing on a Beach for Christmas and finding most of the songs far too happy for my taste. I remember getting Wish in my first year at college, when my Cure fascination was already waning. The album became associated with a happy love that ended with a broken heart, and then I couldn’t listen to Wish for ages. I remember a years-long search for the song “Japanese Dream” (one of the best Cure songs of all time); it was a search that ended just last year, when a German friend and fellow Cure fan made me a great compilation tape with two versions of the song on it.

And, amidst all the other albums, and the singles and remixes and limited releases, there was Pornography. I was embarrassed to buy the album as a sixteen-year-old - I mean, it was called “Pornography". I see Pornography as something of an anomaly in the Cure oeuvre; it doesn’t quite seem to fit with their other albums. The Cure was a never a goth band, they were a pop band (Robert Smith said that himself). But Pornography isn’t a pop album; it’s their darkest, most disturbing, most lonely album. It’s like some drug-induced hallucination at times. The lyrics seem fragmented, the instrumentation is suffocating. “A vision of hell” indeed.

The really fascinating thing about this album is that now, 17 years after it was released, it still doesn’t sound dated (unlike old U2 or Depeche Mode songs, which nowadays I can only really listen to for the nostalgic value - certainly not for the musical value).

Granted, the snare drum on Pornography is mixed in such a way that it does bear more than a passing resemblance to that handclap/whip crack sound we all know and love from the 80’s. The song “A Strange Day” is particularly rooted in the 80’s, but it’s also probably my favorite song on the album - not for the drum sound, though.

But the bass and the rest of the drums rumble and thunder along incessantly, and the driving hypnotic effect of that sound is a clear precursor to the industrial music that would come later. The guitars wail with Robert Smith’s voice (my parents deserve a lot of credit for putting up with that voice for so many years without complaint), and the whole sound is deep, layered and overdriven. It’s a sound that swallows you up.

It’s a strange and violent album, and not one that I listen to a lot; I left the incense and candles phase of my life quite a while ago. But when the mood moves me, when the day is cloudy and I feel that itch of nostalgia, all I have to do is break out Pornography and dance around as if I were 16 again - and it’s “just like the old days…"