"Don't say what you mean, you might spoil your face."

Perfect As Cats: A Tribute To The Cure
Tribute album. The phrase alone should make your skin crawl and move you to scour your record collection to ensure that a Cleopatra operative hasn't snuck "A Loving Industrial Tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber" into it. To paraphrase Ray Smuckles, PLEASE LORD REMOVE TRIBUTE ALBUMS FROM YOUR PLAN FOR US. Tribute albums are among the lowest tricks a record company can play upon the most rabid quotient of a band's fan base. Not only will they be compelled to purchase it for the sake of completion, but they more than anyone will be painfully aware of just how short of the originals so many of the cover versions fall.

The Cure have not been immune to this plague, and like the drooling Cure devotee that I am, I've bought them all: the token Cleo goth tribute, the synthpop bands no one's heard of tribute. Hell, I've even waded through much of the ongoing Pink Pig "we're gonna cover every damn note the band ever committed to tape" Project. So when I caught wind of a Cure tribute primarily made up of young indie-somethings on the horizon, I admit I felt more than a bit like Chuck Yeager: being called back to the front once again to do combat well past my prime with youngsters armed with all manner of new-fangled technological gadgetry. Then I noticed it was a double-disc album. "Christ," I said to myself. "Those are some fast MiGs."

For the most part, "Perfect As Cats" is just as bad as you'd imagine. Someone named Geneva Jacuzzi (c'mon, how could I make that up?) shits the bed while doing a monotone "vampish" take on "The Walk". ("What if I make fun of goth when I cover The Cure? Get it? Because goth is so silly! This'll be great! Wait'll I tell my 'filmmaker' boyfriend!") Kaki King gives Jacuzzi a run for her money in the most ridiculous name contest, and manages to turn the goofy horns and synth gurgles of "Close To Me" into an overly earnest acoustic guitar strum-fest. It's a ploy that could've worked (see Frente!'s cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle"), but King's way-too-breathy delivery makes it sound like a Bright Eyes B-side. Even worse, some bands sound like they just don't care. BlackBlack (who are constituted of Kevin Haskins of Bauhaus' daughters, apparently), Les Bicyclettes Blanches and Katrine Ottosen all sound as though they're doing a pre-gig soundcheck by lackadaisically running through the last song they heard on their tour van's tape deck.

It's not all dreck, and some tracks were able to at least remind me of why I'd bothered to bite into this turd sandwich in the first place - the strength of the original material, even if very few of them take said material into engaging new territory. Astrid Quay offer a cute and honestly straightforward take on "The Caterpillar", and Devastations' version of "The Drowning Man" could be mistaken for the original from a distance. There's nothing new about Mariee Sioux's Joni Mitchell-wannabe plucking of "Lovesong" (and, not to go hog-wild with Achewood references, but no one should get famous simply by covering songs off of "Disintegration"), but her voice kinda reminds me of Marissa Nadler's, so points for that.

It's a testament to the compiler's...mercy, I suppose, that the last handful of tracks on the second disc veer away from what's become a very draining routine by that point. Perhaps anticipating how the listener might feel after umpteen power-pop covers of "Grinding Halt", lo-fi fuck-ups of "Pictures of You" and art-school piss-takes on "Why Can't I Be You?", they've stacked the end of "Perfect With Cats" with some provocative renditions of The Cure's darker material. Corridor take a gamble by shifting the focus of "The Kiss" away from Robert's psych-guitar histrionics and onto Boris Williams' sten-gun drum fills. While the latter disappear almost completely once the former comes to the fore in the original, Corridor keep the drums front and center the whole way through. Tara Busch drives "Let's Go To Bed" well away from the security of its synth-pop playground and into the middle of a broad field of chilling snow designed by Kate Bush where it shivers exquisitely.

And then we've got Jesu's take on "The Funeral Party". Full disclosure: I'm a massive Jesu fan and the promise of hearing Justin Broadrick apply his bowel-quaking waves of symphonic feedback to one of The Cure's most magisterial tracks was motivation enough to fight my way through this whole affair. Expectations were high, but Broadrick never disappoints. At first the production sounded a tad thin, but then I realised I was listening to the track at the same middling volume as the rest of the album. Jesu's sonic aesthetic has always necessitated some extra volume, and with that accomplished a whole new world was revealed. The drums plant massive Roman columns, the synths shear upwards to mottled pink heavens and the vocals are pushed through a fine honeycomb mesh made of silver. Aided by some other worthy highlights (this album blatantly begs to be cherrypicked in emusic or iTunes), Jesu's track redeems much of "Perfect As Cats", and almost makes me forgive it for exposing my brain to the moniker Geneva Jacuzzi. Almost.

Jesu, "The Funeral Party"