As Greatest Hits--and particularly the busking pavement jazz of "Lovecats"--reminds us, the best Cure singles were very often tangential exercises; they offered a goth-free playtime divergence from some of the weightier studiousness of those early albums. Or, as smudged frontman Robert Smith says of this 18-track collection, "Songs that are sung with a smile." This wasn't always true--witness the refrigerated fogginess of the classic "A Forest," the Blair Witch Project of its day. What this compilation does is focus attention on the Cure's perennial unpredictability--the breathless cla... more