Welcome to the latest edition of ‘Golden Vault’, where we delve into the annals of music to bring you a classic album. You’ll know some like the back of your hand and nothing of others. We hope to get you reacquainted with old friends and create new favourites. The album to be taken out of the Golden Vault for reappraisal this week is The Cure's goth masterpiece 'Disintegration'.

Gerascophobia, the fear of aging isn’t very rock n roll but this the unlikeliest of subject matters for an album is exactly what stoked the creative fires of Robert Smith in 1988 when at the age of twenty nine he became fixated about the disintegration of his twenty’s in 365 little days’ time.

Smith had become uncomfortable at the success of his band The Cure’s previous two albums ‘The Head on the Door’ and ‘Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me’. So ill at ease in fact that he wanted to return to the gloom laden sonic architecture which occupied much of the band’s output at the start of the ‘80s.

His internal anguish, increased drug use and conflict within the band due to the spiraling inebriation of bandmate Lol Tolhurst which eventually saw him jettisoned from the band, combined to inspire Smith to pen over thirty songs in preparation and preproduction for the album.

Indeed, Smith had so much belief in said compositions that when he presented a bunch of home demos to the rest of the band he intimated that he would put the group on hold and release them as a solo album if they did not meet with their approval.

Suitably impressed with the compositions, The Cure set about expanding on Smith’s demos before decamping to Oxfordshire with David Allen, who co-produced and engineered the album. Allen, had worked with The Cure in different capacities on their previous three albums and would work with them once more on their subsequent album and final masterpiece to date ’Wish’.

As well as Robert Smith the current incarnation of The Cure included Simon Gallup (bass guitar, keyboards), Porl Thompson (guitars), Boris Williams (drums, percussion), Roger O'Donnell (keyboards, piano), while the deteriorating contribution of Lol Tolhurst is summarised as "other instruments" in the albums liner notes indicating that he physically contributed little if anything to the record other than bringing a sense of foreboding to the studio.

However, perhaps his unsettling presence contributed in creating the suitable atmosphere to record a doom laden seventy two minute opus. ‘Disintegration’ commences with a swirl of wind chimes as if a demon had suddenly apperated into the room, blocking out the sun before Plainsong’s funeral march synths emerge as a stark warning of what is to come. Finally after two minute’s Smith relays a conversation with an unnamed girl who is “…so cold. It's like the cold if you were dead...” It’s a breathtakingly stark opening.

Pictures Of You, follows at a brisk seven minutes and is the first glimpse of Simon Gallup’s athletic post-punk bass-playing which more than once stops this album from falling into the abyss by the tips of his fingertips. Rather than some tale of lost love it seems that the springboard for this composition was in fact a house fire which burnt many of Smith’s old photographs. Pictures Of You became the fourth single from ‘Disintegration’ with a significantly reduced but still long for radio edit clocking in at 4.46.

Closedown feels like a sister-track or a continuation of opener Plainsong with slow, stark imperial synths to the fore as Smith sings a single verse preoccupied with running out of time.

Like Pictures of You before it Lovesong pulls ‘Disintegration’ into more palatable shades of gloom with mournful church organ swells and dancing staccato synths weave a happy sad platform for Smith to declare his undying eternal love for his bride to be.

Smith then utilises clever juxtapositions of themes, moving from eternal love to crushing heartbreak on Last Dance, which examines the nuances of falling out of love with someone and how the crushing blows may be delayed for years. “But Christmas falls late now flatter and colder, and never as bright as when we used to fall. All this in an instant before I can kiss you, a woman now standing were once there was only a girl.”

Lullaby catapulted The Cure to their highest ever UK chart placing (five) and Tim Pope’s delightfully day video won the group a Brit Award for Best Video in 1990. The track unfurls slowly adding layer after layer of syncopated rhythm figures from Gallup’s bouncing bass, to the interweaving guitars of Smith and Thompson to the jittering muted violin synths of Roger O'Donnell which weave seamlessly together to the point that it’s hard to gauge where one ends and the next begins with each instrument integral to the overall feel of the track.

The lyrics make reference to the dark implied violence of Victorian nursery rhymes and perhaps even allude to the groups over indulgence in narcotics “And I feel like I'm being eaten by a thousand million shivering furry holes / And I know that in the morning I will wake up in the shivering cold.”

Fascination Street is another example of The Cure’s ability to maximise the simplest of motifs. Simon Gallup’s bounding bassline hypnotically powers this track for over five minutes as his cohorts go to town slowly layering sounds atop of it. Naturally it takes Smith’s voice over two minutes to enter the fray delivering a vigorous performance.

Strangely, The Cure’s US record company chose Fascination Street to the lead single from the album in America where it reached Number One on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks Chart now known as the Alternative Chart. Despite being one of the lesser known songs on the album Fascination Street remains a strong fan favourite and never quite gets the recognition it deserves in wider circles.

Prayers For Rain returns the album’s gaze to Smith’s overwhelming gerascophobia. Once again Smith uses the creative style of pairing minimal lyrics with long musical structures; a trick which he uses time and time again throughout ‘Disintegration’, as if intending the long gaps between music to be used by fans for reflection upon the doom laden, claustrophobic lyrics referencing desolation and suffocation.

We move from suffocation to a drowning suicide note on Same Deep Waters As You the album’s longest track, slowly unfurls over nine minutes of plaintiff synths coupled with samples of storm noises and downcast lead guitar lines as Smith asks us to “Kiss him goodbye”.

There’s only one place to go from here and that’s up. Title track Disintegration is blissful by comparison, even still Smith appears to be fantasising about the aftermath of his death or the end of his relationship and tries offering justification for his imperfections.

“I never said I would stay to the end. I knew I would leave you with babies and everything screaming like this in the hole of sincerity, screaming me over and over and over I leave you with photographs pictures of trickery Stains on the carpet and Stains on the memory. Songs about happiness, murmured in dreams. When we both of us knew, how the end always is…”

Smith and co are probably pushing their luck a bit by now by having a nine minute song followed by an eight minute song followed by a seven minute song and subsequently closing with a six minute song. Individually they are fine compositions but collectively there is a lot to take in especially as the songs are far from instantaneous in nature and require repeated listens to fully reveal themselves.

Homesick and closer Untitled repeat the happy-sad one-two track placement that permeates the structure of the album as a whole and when Untitled dissolves leaving a sombre lilting refrain that vanishes into the either you can’t help but commend The Cure for having produced an album that brings gothic rock to epic proportions.

This is a genre defining work which is as important to goth as 'Sgt Pepper’s' or 'Pet Sounds' are to rock.