Review: The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World

Review: The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World (Polydor/Fiction)
★★★★★

Some albums need more time to surface. Now, after 16 years, The Cure are back to break your heart with an age-appropriate masterpiece that muses on mortality.

On one level, The Cure’s first studio album since 2008 is strangely unshowy: there are only eight songs, so it’s finished in less than 50 minutes. What those eight songs say, however, is as important as anything as Robert Smith has ever sung.

Not since David Bowie’s Blackstar has an album been so expressive about mortality. If Blackstar was about Bowie’s own death, The Cure have created a mortality record whose beauty lies in perfectly expressing the need to savour love while we can.

That’s hardly a unique sentiment, but the bold, bleak expression of Smith mourning his elder brother Richard in I Can Never Say Goodbye is devastating: the singer of Pornography seeing exactly what lies at the end of the telescope decades later and wanting none of it.

A Fragile Thing

Even more heartbreaking, And Nothing Is Forever will instantly become the favourite song for couples who have grown old with The Cure. Smith has played keyboards for years, but he’s matured as a pianist since the days of 4:13 Dream, his wonderfully graceful performance underscoring a relatively simple lament where he pleads: “Promise you’ll be with me in the end.”

Smith’s newly moving piano had also driven the A Fragile Thing single. Yet, as much as The Cure’s dead world is built on seeing life break apart, nothing can prepare listeners for the incredible Endsong. Even its rumbling six-minute introduction before Smith begins singing doesn’t warn you of the staggering four-minute summary of his life when he does, set to the band wanting to honour The Cure’s legacy in as moving a manner as possible. Again, “How did I get so old?” isn’t a unique theme. But… just listen to it. Endsong deserves to be the finale of any Cure show. Yes, it’s that good.

It’s not quite all big themes. The angry teenager still lurks, with Drone: Nodrone a vintage strop, complete with appropriately droning guitars, as Smith snaps out a succession of “It’s all ‘Don’t know, I really don’t’” teenspeak parodies. More seriously, Warsong is as downright heavy as The Cure have ever been, a more adroit barrage than 2004’s self-titled album as Smith addresses why he and indeed most men get so angry in the first place. Like the rest of the album, not a note is out of place.

Despite their long absence, the band are barely saying anything for this LP. They don’t need to. In just eight songs, many long intros and all, Smith expresses his feelings clearer than ever. He’s speaking for so many of his audience as he does so. God, we’ve missed them. But Songs Of A Lost World earns its 16-year gestation.

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