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eric on Dec 11th 2008 Downloads, Listen, Music

Hey! I made a good find! The Cure – Entreat!

Some of you folks, no doubt, know of my liking of 80’s gothy sensations, The Cure. You might also know that I only like The Cure to about 1989, with their Disintegration album. Their next album, Wish, was alright, but didn’t really do it for me.

So, for me, The Cure ends with Disintegration.

And why not? Disintegration was an album full of amazing songs. There’s not one clunker in the bunch!

When I was a kid, in 1989, while vacationing with my parents in Ocean City, Maryland, I picked up a little boxed set called Integration. It was the four CD singles released from the Disintegration albums (“Fascination Street,” “Love Song,” “Lullaby,” and “Pictures of You.”) While “Fascination Street” and “Love Song” had true B-Sides (unreleased studio songs), the B-Sides to “Lullaby” and “Pictures of You” were live versions of a handful of songs from Disintegration.

Live songs as B-sides usually piss me off. It’s usually a cheap and crappy way to fill up space. But something was different about these live songs. They were full of energy (which is something odd for The Cure). Even the dreary songs had a level of excitement to them. These versions, all of them, were better than the album versions.

At that point, at age 14 or 15 and before the Googles, I had no way of knowing when and where these amazing recordings came from.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned about their source. They came from a promo-only live album called Entreat. The CD of it was long out of print and usually went for $100ish. I found it on a P2P site and downloaded it.

Brilliant and amazing. The five or six songs that appeared as B-sides were there along with a few others, equally brilliant.

Well, just a couple of days ago, I found it on vinyl. I’ve not listened to it in a couple of years and now I can’t get it out of my head.

So, I thought I’d share it.

Here’s the track list:

“Pictures of You” – 7:08
“Closedown” – 4:23
“Last Dance” – 4:41
“Fascination Street” – 5:20
“Prayers For Rain” – 4:49
“Disintegration” – 7:41
“Homesick” – 6:49
“Untitled” – 6:33

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And if you’d like it, get it.

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