CURED

Oh, the early 80´s... what a bad time for 70´s prog acts! Well, I guess Steve Hackett had to try his talents on the pop market sooner or later, and Cured was the result. Not too bad if you compare it to the downright hideous solo stuff some of his ex Genesis bandmates were doing at that period: Tony Banks The Fugitive and Mike Rutheford´s Acting Very Strange. However, I was not really sure where he would like to go with Cured: it is too pop for his audience up till then and too progressive for the pop market. Quite an schizofrenic album it is... A very short one also (it constains little more than 33 minutes of music in all)

On the positive side what strikes me most is Hackett´s new found vocal habilities. He handles all the voices (often multitracked) and does a suprisingly good job on all of them. Unlike Banks and Rutheford his voice is quite pleasant and works wonders all the time. I had to go to the credits to see if he was the sole singer or if there was some guest. Nope. He did it. Kudos to him. His guitar playing is still brilliant and fluid as ever. However, the the keyboards are pretty much dated, with that typical plastic synth sound of the period. And there is the almost inevitable programmed drum machine.Too bad. The songwriting here is not that good either. The lyrics are bland at best, but I could live with that if the tunes were stronger.

There is, of course, some nice stuff here, specially on the instrumental side. But the results are quite uncharacteristic. His transition was a bit too radical, I guess. Genesis transformation into a pop outfit was a far slower process that worked well, at least commercially. They were able to retain a large portion of their former fans through the years and acquire many new ones. Here things did not worked out that well. He is not a pop artist in the vein of Phil collins ofr sure (who always had a knack to write good hooks and melodies). The presence of some acoustic instrumentals sound completely out of place when put together with the more commercial stuff.

Cured was clearly a mistake, not a sin. Not a too bad mistake either, since it had some nice moments, but a mistake anyway. Definitly an album for (hardcore) fans and collectors. And not the one a newbie should pick up if he wants to start to know the work of one of prog´s greatest and most influential guitarrists.

Rating: 2,5 stars.