"Cover my face as the animals die"

I bought The Cure's 1982 disc Pornography some months ago, and I've been listening to it and thinking about it lately. People find it depressing and it's very easy to see why. It's a dark, forboding, forbidding, rather nihilistic record that begins on the edge of chaos and then falls ever deeper into it. The first line is "It doesn't matter if we all die," and for the next half hour or so you get this gradual sense of darkness invisible, of people diminishing into nothing, like the blurry, ghoulish faces of the bandmembers on the cover. The last song, the title cut, is a cut-up blast of backmasking, white noise and eerie vocals. I'm thinking of Pasolini's Salo on an auditory level. Pornography indeed.