AMG Review of Disintegration

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

The 2010 Deluxe Edition of the Cure’s 1989 masterwork Disintegration offers a plethora of riches as it is expanded by not just one but two CDs for a whopping total of 32 tracks. Dig into the details and the deluxe Disintegration winds up seeming a little underwhelming. All the non-live B-sides -- a grand total of four (“Babble,” “Out of Mind,” “2 Late,” “Fear of Ghosts”) -- wound up on the 2004 rarities clearinghouse Join the Dots, so they’re not recycled here. Instead, all the live tracks that were used as B-sides in various territories for the album’s four singles are here, presented as the live album Entreat, which itself was released in 1991 as an easy roundup of these cuts. As an enticement for collectors, this live album is augmented by four previously unreleased cuts, so it is now an in-concert replica of Disintegration, something that is perfectly fine but doesn’t stray much from the original blueprint. The rarities disc contains the first sketches of those blueprints and they’re pretty rough indeed: instrumental home demos, band rehearsals, rough cuts with guide vocals, the kind of stuff that is archivally interesting.