Let’s not go overboard. It’s so tempting! You want to go overboard in a situation like this! A great legacy act returns with its first album in a long time, one that explicitly calls back to thing things that made the group so beloved in the first place? That’s what we want! Given our reunion-friendly touring climate, it’s something that happens more often than you might expect! When it happens, fans and critics have a tendency to get too excited, to praise the new record in ways that almost diminish the old ones. It’s a shortcut to living in the past, insisting that yesterday’s trailblazers are superior to today’s. It’s the line of thinking that leads Time Out Of Mind to defeat OK Computer, both at the Grammys and on the 1997 Pazz & Jop poll. So let’s not do that to the Cure. Let’s take a breath.
OK. We’re breathing. We’re putting everything in perspective. We’re keeping our expectations reasonable. Songs Of A Lost World is the Cure’s first new album in 16 years, and their last one, 2008’s 4:13 Dream, was nobody’s favorite. The last time the Cure were a truly vital and relevant force in music, popular or otherwise, was probably 1992, when they dropped Wish. That was 32 years ago. There’s a very good chance that you, the person reading this review, were not yet born when that happened. The Cure released four more studio LPs after Wish, and they all have their adherents, but few would argue that they’re up there with the band’s best. For half that time, the Cure have been quiet, though they’re continued to put on dizzying live shows and to say warm and reasonable things in interviews. The goodwill is through the roof. The world wants a great Cure record. The world wants the new Cure record to be great.
Well, the Cure made a great new record. In the interest of not going overboard, I will say that Songs Of A Lost World is the most monochromatic type of great Cure record. Over the band’s long, twisty history, they’ve built an image — the miserablists with the teased hair and the makeup — and they’ve also undermined that image at every turn. The Cure’s catalog is full of zippy pop bangers, explosive left-field sunbursts, and all-out rockers. The gauzy desperation of an album like Disintegration works so beautifully because you never know when a snatch-your-breath pop song like “Pictures Of You” will emerge out of the murk. Songs Of A Lost World doesn’t work that way. It’s all murk. If you’re arguing that it’s the Cure’s best since Disintegration, you need to show your work.
But how about the best since Bloodflowers? In the lead-up to the Cure’s 2000 album, Robert Smith talked a lot about how it was his most satisfying artistic experience in years and how the record was supposed to be a third entry in a trilogy with Pornography and Disintegration. It’s not that. Bloodflowers is long and ponderous, and it doesn’t have melodies that can stick in your head. But have you listened to Bloodflowers lately? It’s awesome — upon revisiting, way better than I remembered. Bloodflowers presents a total immersive sonic environment, a deep dive into the heaviest parts of the Cure. Songs Of A Lost World works in much the same way, and it might be even better. Don’t go into Songs Of A Lost World expecting anything on the level of Disintegration. Keep the Bloodflowers precedent in mind. Judged on that basis — or even just on its own, as a self-contained piece of music — Songs Of A Lost World is amazing.
With all caveats out of the way, it is absolutely ridiculous that a new Cure album could be as good as this one. After the brickwalled ’00s radio-rock slickness of the last two Cure albums, the production on Songs Of A Lost World is deep and soft and velvety. The guitars leave traces in the air. The keyboards shimmer. Robert Smith is now 65 years old, but his voice still has a teenage hesitation-hiccup dramatic intensity. The sheer sound of the record is a marvel. Smith co-produced the LP with with the Cure’s former recording engineer Paul Corkett, and that duo happens to be the same team who handled the Bloodflowers production. Together, they understand how a Cure record should sound.
For the first time since A Head In The Door, Robert Smith wrote all the songs on Songs Of A Lost World entirely by himself, with no songwriting credits for any of his bandmates. You can’t tell. Smith has always been the key songwriter in the Cure, but Songs Of A Lost World sounds like a band at work. Maybe that’s because the Cure have been playing these songs live for years now; they’ve had time to gel. Everyone shines on the record. Former David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels has been the Cure’s full-time guitarist since 2012, but this is the first time he’s gotten to play on one of the band’s records. His leads — molten rock riffage, blurred through layers of silk and muslin — add psychedelic swoop and grandeur. Drummer Jason Cooper absolutely wallops, and the production artfully muffles him without taking away his power. The band understands how to churn and linger, and the songs build with assured grace. These guys are fully dialed in with each other.
Songs Of A Lost World isn’t a terribly long record, but it takes its time. Often, Robert Smith’s voice won’t come in until the song is nearly half over. The rest of the band will set an atmosphere, growling and swooshing and echoing, before Smith comes in with his instantly familiar moan. When Smith does sing, his voice comes up from a well of despair. For decades, Smith has pushed back on the idea of the Cure as kings of gloom-rock. But Smith wrote these songs while he was mourning the losses of his mother, his father, and his older brother. If there’s ever been a good excuse to get maudlin, it’s continuing to live life on this planet without the people who loom largest in your memory.
Without context, some of the lyrics on Songs Of A Lost World might look histrionic on paper: “Something wicked this way comes from out the cruel and treacherous night/ Something wicked this way comes to steal away my brother’s life.” But even if you don’t know Robert Smith’s biographical details, you can tell that there’s no pastiche, no character-setting, in the way that he sings words like that. Instead, he relies on a long-established persona to help make sense of very real losses. Annihilation and solitude presumably feel very different now than they did with Smith was a young man, but he’s spent his life developing a sonic language to explore those themes, and he’s taking full advantage today.
The songs on Songs Of A Lost World are variations on a theme. Musically, we get peaks and valleys. “Drone Nodrone” is the hardest, most immediate track on the LP. It’s got some of the same guttural churn that the Cure brought to “Fascination Street,” and I’m a bit impressed that the band didn’t release it as a red-herring early single. By contrast, “Endsong” is a luxuriant closer that stretches over 10 minutes, and there’s something ecstatic about its sighing, expensive-sounding synths. But while the moods shift, the message remains the same: The world’s light is dimming, and you can see your own end coming around the corner.
On “Alone,” the album’s stunning opener and first single, Robert Smith raises his glass to oblivion: “Here is to love, to all the love falling out of our lives/ Hopes and dreams are gone/ The end of every song.” In the songs that follow, Smith asks himself the same questions and gives himself the same answers again and again. “I’m pretty much done.” “I’m outside in the dark, wondering how I got so old.” “I know that my world is grown old and nothing is forever.” “My weary dance of age and resignation moves me slow toward a dark and empty stage where I can sing of all I know.”
If I didn’t know better, Songs Of A Lost World might sound like a farewell, a final statement. But Smith is already talking about releasing another two Cure albums over the next few years. So maybe Songs Of A Lost World is more a document of someone resigning himself to living in a state of constant loss, the saddest byproduct of surviving long enough to lose a whole lot of people. The miracle of Songs Of A Lost World is that Smith never sounds like he’s crushed under that weight. Instead, he describes and evokes those feelings with muscle and vitality and commitment. He’s speaking a language that he’s largely responsible for encoding, and he’s got complete command of that vocabulary.
In the end, that’s the beauty of Songs Of A Lost World. It’s not a perfect album. It’s limited in sound and scope and mood. If you’re not in the right headspace, it could sound leaden or one-note. If you are in the right headspace, it could become your entire universe. Songs Of A Lost World isn’t one of the best Cure albums; it might not even be in the top half of the band’s discography. It’s probably not one of the year’s best, either, though it would be a lock for any longer list that I might make. The album doesn’t need to be any of those things. Without going overboard, Songs Of A Lost World is a triumph of craft and feeling. It’s a gorgeous and fully realized piece of work from a band that looked like it might never make another one. I don’t have to exaggerate one bit when I say that its existence is a miracle.
Songs Of A Lost World is out 11/1 on Fiction/Capitol Records.
