THE CURE
Songs Of A Lost World (Universal Music)
PLAYING THIS ALBUM IN THE FINAL week or so of the US elections, when tempered enthusiasm met grim portents and no one wanted to trust in something as flimsy as good will, cliché would have it that The Cure would provide the musical equivalent of doomscrolling. After all, this is the band, not Quo, that really should have soundtracked those Coles ads: down down, deeper and down.
Yeah, whatever. Full time fans would know, but for occasional visitors, those maybe looking for cats in cupboards or Camus on the beach, don’t believe the stories and the supposed history: black doesn’t have to mean black.
The first Cure album in seven prime ministers/16 years, a record that touches on deaths in Robert Smith’s family and a gnawing sense of dislocation that is both of his age and of this age, that mostly eschews dancing or even particularly brisk walking, that looks over the horizon and catches a glimpse, again, of end times, does its best work in grandeur and dramatic energy that buoy us on.
It elevates by grace and scale – sometimes massive scale – and convinces not because of that scale but because there is a genuine sense of purpose in its understanding. It consoles by not pretending that we are irrevocably broken or eminently fixable, but just moving on and adapting. It is, in other words, utterly human, but a little more so.
Scale? Songs never clock in under four minutes, three heading towards seven, the final song, Endsong, sails past 10 minutes. It is three minutes into the opening track, Alone, before we even hear the first vocal from Smith, and more than six minutes into the final track before he arrives. Atmosphere controls and threatens to dominate, but that voice arrives – seemingly unchanged from 20 years ago, 30 years ago – and the shapes become familiar.
Incidentally, those first lines are “This is the end of every song that we sing/The fire burnt out to ash and the stars go doom with tears”. The final words on the album are “Left alone with nothing/The end of every song/Nothing”. Grim? Our disintegrating? Strangely much less disturbing than Smith sounded in the darkest depths of Disintegration. Which may say as much about us in 2024 as him.
The bass sounds vibrate at mid-levels and carry lightly anything lower but tether everything so that drums that seem built of mammoth skins, solid oaks and steel fence snares, can be the aggressors, as they are in Warsong and the opening section of Endsongs, or the harriers on the edges, as in I Can Never Say Goodbye. Synthesisers and pianos in And Nothing Is Forever engage on equal terms – neither cold nor needy – and when strings arrive they don’t feel like consolation but companions. But in All I Ever Am, those keyboards bounce almost playfully like shafts of light.
Relative newcomer guitarist (and not for nothing in this sonic context, former Bowie collaborator in Tin Machine), Reeves Gabrels, squeals against the thunder in Drone:Nodrone, rough-faced among its charging, neo-metal surface, but pierces in Endsong, where he sounds more pointed. His more chiming tone in A Fragile Thing happily plays second fiddle to Simon Gallup’s bass, moving in and out of the wash of sound, and there’s something similar in All I Ever Am until an escalating run tips that song into the closest thing to a pop song to be found here.
Let’s not overplay that: it's dark inside this album, with Smith asking himself to hold on to things he isn’t convinced he can grip. But the comfort and, yes, joy, for us comes in the whole body experience that the band conjures, that enveloping, cocooning even, environment.
After some decent but not exactly compelling albums in the first decade of this century, and touring that seemed, understandably, hooked into the past in the absence of a strong new present, it’s not too hard to say this is the best Cure album in a long while. But it’s more than that. Songs Of A Lost World feels like a proper statement record, one that confirms and refines the definition of a Cure album.
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