if you want to hear a band that hit its prime, check out "Faith"....one of the Cure's deepest and mind bending albums ever recorded. the third track is amazing...tribal drum beats, a bass line that rumbles through in perfect rhythm, smith holding in with a dreamy strum of his electric, and layers of floating smith vocals that will send shivers down your spine. and that's just one song.

this release has been an all time favorite of mine for almost fifteen years, and i don't think i'll ever tire of it. every song...from the chillingly, eerie pace of (a cure classic in every sense) to the all bass guitar driven ...yes, this album is dark, but it is more peaceful than anything else. i can listen to Faith for hours while i write, chill with friends, or just drift off into a deep sleep.

i can't reccommend this CD enough. it truly is a great collection of cure music. you want driving beats, raw bass lines with a punk feel? you got it. you want twisted, morbidly glowing goth? you got it. there's a wonderful pacing of music flow....and you'll just end up of floating along with it.

All in all, i'd say there is no diehard cure fan on the planet that does not own Faith. if i'm wrong, shame on you. buy it. Faith is part of the Cure's : "Seventeen Seconds", "Faith", and "Pornography". 3 Cure albums...so similar in tone, yet so different in meaning. "Faith", the middle of the three is almost the calm before the storm, which would be "Pornography". i look at it all as a trilogy in the Cure archive.

to listen to Faith is to experience Faith. one of the Cure's finest....

I have every Cure album. I love this album, and "Pornography", because they are (to me) The Cure's two "trance" albums (for want of better words), they distort the room's ambience and twist your head. Both Faith and Pornography are best appreciated by lying down on the floor with your eyes closed and head between the stereo's speakers. Just lie still and let Faith's reverbing emptiness slowly descend and wash over you and it will put you into it's trance. You'll progress effortlessly through these moody tracks, rolling along with the momentum of "Primary", soaking up Smith's disturbed ambience in "The Holy Hour"... and by the time you get through "All Cat's Are Grey" and "The Funeral Party" it will have meditated within you a listless futile vulnerable feeling. There's a manically hostile detour with "Doubt", and then slowly the mood decends more and more into a cerebral despair - the utter melancholy of "The Drowning Man", symbolic of the whole Faith experience, spartan disjointed and spooky riffs which accompany Robert Smith's desperate "drowning" voice, blurring into the final track "Faith" where he finally declares his absolute despair. Remember this is 1981, the height of New Wave synthesizer pop - The Cure managed to perfect a balance with the new electronic sounds, not abusing it, just skilfully crafting this trademark sombre mood. There's lots of stand outs (tracks like "Other Voices", "Doubt", "Primary", etc) but I prefer to take this album as one continuous 'thing', from start to finish, the sum being more powerful for me than the parts. A masterpiece of "mood engineering".

I can't listen to this record too much because it requires a great deal from the listener, and at the wrong moments can almost be painful. Inevitably throughout the course of a listen to Faith I will get that hollow distant feeling in the pit of my stomach, that raw ache that people like Camus and Sartre were so keen on. Very few records still have that sort of impact after repeated listens, particular as many repeated listens as this ones gotten from me. The album is bleak and sparse, alternating from jagged, angular bass guitar duets like primary to the surreal synthetic and electric soundscapes of all cats are grey. It requires a listener's patience and a willingness to be taken into it's realm. The songs are long, and many of them ignore traditional song forms completely, eschewing such limiting devices as verses choruses and refrains. In my opinion this is The Cure's most fully realized work, and while their song craft has taken them in many different directions since the early eighties when this came out, when people talk about the Cure, the album that comes into my mind is their third release, Faith. It's so agonizingly gorgeous, everyone should hear it at least twice.

In the early 80's a trend emerged for depressing music: Joy Division, The Cure and later the goth movement encouraged people to look on the gloomy side of life. This can sometimes be more therapeutic than it sounds although please don't turn yourself into a full-time goth- they were just very sad people with no friends. Of all Cure albums this is one of the most miserable. Switch off the lights, close your eyes and let the gloom spread over you. Seven of the eight songs on here are classics of depression. The best song is undoubtedly the up-tempo single 'Primary' but other classics are 'All cats are grey', 'The Drowning Man' and 'Faith'. More than likely you will be left with little understanding of what the songs are actual trying to say- the lyrics usually sound fairly arty but ultimately meaningless. But what great atmosphere pieces! Robert Smith was never a very good singer but he was an excellent song-writer. If the only thing you know by the Cure is 'Friday I'm in Love' you are probably better off buying the 'Standing on the Beach' greatest hit collection before trying out the depressing trilogy of Cure masterpieces: '17 Seconds', 'Faith' and 'Pornography'. Personally this is one of my favorite Cure albums.

I picked this album and 17Seconds up on a rainy grey Saturday. I played the disk while I was doing errands around the apt. "All Cats are Grey" came on and I had to sit down. The piano at the end of that track still rings in my head. "Two pale figures ache in silence... timeless in the quiet ground... side by side in age and sadness"... Funeral Party. I had never heard anything like this before. At the time I had several Cure disks (late 80s), but I had never heard their early stuff. I ended up listening to it at least a dozen times that day. I don't think any music will ever impact me the way this disk has.....