CDVS: The Flesh Vs. The Cure

Here's what we think happened: Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me started its seductive slither on Earth 18 years ago and charmed us all for a good long time before finally evaporating into the magnetosphere, where it formed a swirling, primordial cloud around the planet. Time passed. Cosmic rays were involved. Over the next decade, internal gravitational forces caused the slow re-coalescence of the album's life energy into a double-album's worth of brand new tunes. Ten of them--the cheekiest, danciest, herky-jerkiest ones--began an orbital decay and fell to Earth, absorbing modern hip-hop emissions from the lower atmosphere before finally plunking down in the form of The Flesh's self-titled debut LP.

How else to explain the inconsolable minorization? The acquired taste of Flesh leadman Nathan Halpern's sneery dream images? How else to explain the presence of titles like "Fall to Heaven" and "Foes" if not mere scramblings of "Just Like Heaven" and "Fight"?

True, the warm keyboard blankets woven by Lawrence Tolhurst in 1987 have been recycled into discontinuous, staccatoed remnants, even if they've retained their ska-kissed, carnival of the damned mojo. True, Halpern's sung verses have lost their tails, those protracted falsetto wails that once curled under Robert Smith. In fact, preliminary research suggests that the more nasal, truncated bleats capping the ends of Halpern's lines were recently formed as a result of chance Earth-level saturation by White Stripes vocalist Jack White.

No further conclusions can be drawn currently, but if this hypothesis is correct, we should sooner or later see a second full-length album by The Flesh consisting of material from the slower, more billowy tracks of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me that have yet to attain sufficient density for a fall to Earth. The international musicosmology community is excited at the prospect, although there is some concern that this predicted second wave of compacted, ultra-gloomy "curefall" might wreak havoc with satellite transmissions, or possibly spawn a chronic condition among sensitive individuals tentatively dubbed "gothitoxicosis," and marked by persistent, sallow-eyed self-estrangement.--Dave Surratt