Shallow Rewards

Shallow Rewards

By Shallow RewardsMusicMusic History
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Shallow Rewards episodes

  • The Cure: Bloodflowers
    On the unexpectedly estimable Bloodflowers, Robert Smith’s legacy-saving last gasp as a songwriter; its tragically dated brick wall + Pro Tools production; and Smith’s egotistical severing of ties with everyone who’d helped fashion the Cure in its glory days.

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    41 min
  • The Cure: Wild Mood Swings
    On the tragic collapse of the Cure following the career-topping Wish, the various distractions that beset Wild Mood Swings, and how the persistent obstinance Robert Smith had relied on for so long finally failed him.Here’s the Vox article I reference in the last third of the show.

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    41 min
  • The Cure: Wish
    On the Cure’s surfeit of activity between Disintegration and Wish; the 1992 smash album’s highs and lows; and how for many fans, Wish remains a disappointment when set against the material that preceded it. Further to the podcast, please enjoy an essay I wrote on the subject, and an attendant remix of Wish, from 2011.

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    38 min
  • The Smiths is Dead
    Over a few drinks, and Stephen Kijak’s calamitous Shoplifters of the World, Elliot Busch-Wheaton returns after a five-year hiatus to discuss the legacy of the Smiths and Morrissey in America.

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    42 min
  • The Cure: Blue Sunshine, the Banshees & The Top
    On Robert Smith and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ brief, turbulent marriage; the side projects that outshone their combined efforts; and how from fall 1982 to fall 1984, Robert Smith lost the plot in order to find it again.

    Pursuant to this era are a few essays I contributed to a tumblr called One Week One Band eight years ago:

    MINUTIAE & MADNESS: THE CURE IN 1982LIKE AN ANIMAL: ROBERT SMITH IN WONDERLANDTHE LOOKING GLASS GIRL

    A Spotify playlist is available here.

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    38 min
  • The Cure: Pornography
    On the rabid, raging fin de siècle of the Cure’s vaunted goth trilogy, Pornography; whether it is the singular statement the band and critics have increasingly claimed; and the murkier reality of Robert Smith’s many extracurricular entanglements in 1982.

    Spotify playlist available here.

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    29 min
  • The Cure: Faith
    On the great grey Anglican monolith that is Faith, the Cure’s “difficult third album”; the inescapable shadow of Joy Division’s Closer; being branded “the new PF”; and whether any twenty-one year-old should be held to account for the quality of their poetry.

    Spotify playlist is available here.

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    30 min
  • The Cure: Seventeen Seconds
    On the Cure’s second album, the impossibly crisp Seventeen Seconds; its debatable debts to Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Wire and Gary Numan; and the arrival of Robert Smith as a modern songwriter, but not yet a persona. An accompanying Spotify playlist is available here.

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    41 min
  • From Ballyhoo to Britpop: XTC (Part 2)
    On the improbable endurance of XTC, a band signed during the punk frenzy that would bring song-craft back to the fore in the early 1980s. Following a fractious period of financial instability and pressure from Virgin records, the band went on strike in the early 1990s, unable to wrest themselves from one of the worst contracts ever signed.

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    40 min
  • From Ballyhoo to Britpop: XTC (Part 1)
    On the improbable endurance of XTC, a band signed during the punk frenzy that would bring song-craft back to the fore in the early 1980s. Following a fractious period of financial instability and pressure from Virgin records, the band went on strike in the early 1990s, unable to wrest themselves from one of the worst contracts ever signed.

    CORRECTION: While there are conflicting accounts of the Elvis Costello/Stephen Stills incident, I mistakenly state it occurred during EC’s “first time in America,” when it was his third tour if I recall correctly. This is both factually wrong and in part seeds undeserving sympathy for Elvis. His age and drug abuse stand, but my invocation and retelling of this moment should be weighed against the facts.

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    32 min

About Shallow Rewards

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Celebrating the days of advertised oversampling ratios.

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