When Robert Smith's long-running group made this debut (actually the resequenced American version of the British Three Imaginary Boys), they weren't the Goth-and-reverb, new wave heroes they later became; they were just a trio of disaffected kids who didn't like what was on the radio, because it wasn't smart enough or dark enough. Smith's lyrics are bleakly sarcastic (as when he spells out the title of "Fire in Cairo") and literate (the single "Killing an Arab," a nihilistic sketch based on a scene from Albert Camus's The Stranger). The band matches them with swift, tingling arrangements that dodge skillfully around rock's machismo and self-indulgence, even when Smith launches into the occasional gnarled little solo. --Douglas Wolk
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