My Top 20 albums from 1980 No 14

Seventeen Seconds 7 ( 1980, UK pos 20 )
A Reflection / Play For Today / Secrets / In Your House / Three / The Final Sound / A Forest / M / At Night / Seventeen Seconds

Enter Simon Gallup to play bass, after Mr Dempsey apparently didn't like Robert Smith's new lyrics or songs. We've also got a keyboard player here, so The Cure become a proper four-piece of guitars/vocals, keyboards, bass and drums. Perversely, they sound much less like an actual band here than they did on their debut. Well, let me explain. They sound more focused and tighter and have certainly got better, yet where are the live sounding drums? Where are the rock and roll guitars? Well, nowhere to be seen of course. 'Seventeen Seconds' has a drum pattern that is the same throughout all the songs, yet subtly varied, sped up or slowed down, for each one. Sometimes, not even that! The bass also varies, just enough, picking out different moods. Yes, 'Seventeen Seconds' does indeed have different moods. It's also an album quite hard to actually write about. Well, i'll try my best. Robert Smith wasn't too happy with 'Three Imaginary Boys' as an actual album. So, 'Seventeen Seconds' is deliberately cohesive, to the point that yeah, all the songs seem to sound more or less the same. Yet, we've got different lyrics and different tempos and different guitar melodies and different bass patterns. Even if all the guitar parts use the same tone and all the bass guitar parts use the same tone. Ahem. Well, it's certainly interesting on a first or second listen, as the sounds merge together song after song, yet the likes of 'A Forest' or 'Play For Today' immediately jump out at you as proper, melodic pop songs.

I'll start somewhere. 'A Reflection' which is immediately quiet yet unsettling, stripped back, so simple yet effective. We have a highlight with the mighty 'Play For Today', a song which opens in a very similar fashion to 'Jumping On Someone Elses Train', a Cure single released more or less around the same time. Yet, as with all of 'Seventeen Seconds', similar yet different. It's certainly one of the more fleshed out, effective set of lyrics on an album that in a way, relies upon its lyrics. 'Secrets', with its instrumental sections and quiet vocals, appropriately so. Secrets. The slower 'In Your House' with a bass line that attracts. An experimental mid-section to the album surrounding key track, 'A Forest'. Only by the time 'At Night' arrives do you slightly wonder and worry. The title track closing this set is similarly inconclusive. Robert Smith attempting to make a full album that works, without obvious high and low, with a set mood that's varied still. It's let down by 'Seventeen Seconds' lacking a concept and lacking a particular reason to be. Still, it was a step forwards for them, a leap in sound they would subsequently come back to, and expand upon.