Today I got the new Cure boxset titled “Join the Dots”. It is a 4 cd set housed insdie a small book and compiles b-sides and rare/unreleased tracks spanning their entire career. Being a HUGE cure fan, I was pretty jazzed upon hearing about this coming out. The set is a nice collection but it has a few glaring omissions.
Having compiled my very own 3cd collection of rare tracks from all the Cure stuff in The Punk Vault, I knew what I expected to see on here as far as early material goes and they did include most of it, but I would have loved to have the song “World War” which was originally on Boys Don’t Cry when it was available on vinyl, but then intentionally removed from the album when it was released on CD (with the exception being the first German pressing of the CD which included it, but was subsequently removed in all pressings after). I guess the story with that song is that Robert Smith never really liked it. Well, that is a pretty lame reason to remove a song that you had already released on an album, not to mention it is a great tune. So that isn’t on here. Also missing was “Carnage Visors” which is a very long, instrumental song that was the flip side of the Faith cassette released in the 80s. Lastly, I thought it would have been cool to include Curiosity which was the bonus material that was on the Concert: A Cure Live cassette released by Fiction Records but long out of print.
So I guess the time I spent a couple years ago making my own collection didn’t go to waste as it contains things not found on here, plus there is a boatload of tracks on this collection that I don’t have, mostly all stuff from cd sinlges that they released from the last couple albums they made. I either didnt’ see these, or didn’t care about them when they intially came out as they were cd’s and not vinyl and in general, I don’t buy a lot of cd’s.
I thought the book that this set is housed in was well done and the liner notes were a very interesting, if not incomplete, read. They failed to mention “Fascination Street” being a single in the US for instance. All these gripes of mine are rather minor, none of them detract from the enjoyment of this set, nor made me feel like it wasn’t worth the money, for my first impression is that it was worth the purchase. I guess they had to draw the line somewhere and had they not, this easily could have been a 10 CD boxset instead of 4, and thus they might have eliminated some potential customers by the high prcie tag that would have been attached to such a thing. It would be cool if they did another set, compiling the aforementioned omissions along with more unearthed material, though I doubt that is in the cards.
If yr a Cure fan (and if you are not, you should be), this is well worth picking up. If you are a hardcore Cure fan, you might be a tad bit disappointed with what was left on the cutting room floor, but you’ll likely still find a welcome spot for it in your collection.
