From Louder Than War:
The Cure Songs of a Lost World
5/5
By John Robb
An album of elegiac, brooding masterpieces that deal with the heartbreak of loss with dark, masterful music dripping with melody, nuance and atmosphere.
As the late and great Bill Shankly once wisely remarked, ‘People say football’s a matter of life and death to me, and I say, ’listen, it’s more important than that.’
Bill knew a few things, but he may never have understood that pop culture at its best is even more important than life and death and even football, especially when it sings of both.
On their new album that sonically defies mortality and yet is steeped in the heartbreak of that mortality, The Cure, who feel like they have been in our lives forever like a monolithic backdrop, are coming to grips with the fading to the light of family and the post-punk generation as it steps into its own twilight zone with a powerful, brooding album that marks our own impermanence.
Few bands can deal with such profound shadows well and make it work without the cliches but then few bands are The Cure. The band have spent decades soundtracking the emotional and the personal and making it work in stadiums by making that personal public and into slices of precious art.
‘Songs Of A Lost World’ was written and recorded over the last decade plus with the spectre of death brooding in its shadows after the loss of Robert’s mother, father and ten year older brother, who turned him onto pop culture and took him to the Isle of White festival in 1970. The loss of close family members of Robert and other band members, plus sickness, brings all the pain, sadness, and nostalgia unleashed like a pandora’s box of emotions that are entwined with these songs. Heavy stuff like this is not to be run away from though and the Cure are perhaps the perfect vehicle to musically and lyrically reflect these runaway emotions.
Over the decades, the band has soundtracked both life and death so perfectly. It’s like the way that generational godhead Bowie zigzagged from his effervescent sci-fi glam pop of the seventies to his own epitaph Blackstar album. Similarly, The Cure are post punk period sonic artists who can paint all these darker pictures and not shy away from life’s brief reality.
To an outsider, the Cure may have had a somewhat schizoid musical journey from the intense genius of May 1982’s ‘Pornography’ album to the dayglo pop rush of their pop pomp, and yet both and all the other styles are crucial to their journey because, like the Beatles in the ’60s, the Cure work because, like all the best artists, they are free to embrace any style of music at whim and make it their own.
It’s in this emotional and creative space that, after 16 years, they finally release their new album and it’s back to the dark energy Cure. Following its long and arduous journey through the rumour mill has been fascinating – once there was talk of a double and solo album or the two sides of the Cure coming out on different records. When I was in Rockfield Studios a couple of years ago, the staff there said the band had been in, and a dark and captivating album was getting micro mixed.
They were right.
The 8 songs that have finally made the cut are beautiful slices of Smithsonian art. Slotting somewhere between ‘Pornography’ and ‘Disintegration’ but with a new Cure 3.0 take on their own inner space, they amp up the melancholy for yet another new version of the Cure with elegiac, brooding masterpieces that are dripping with melody, nuance, and atmosphere.
It’s been a long and strange journey for the band who we fell in with on those early Peel sessions and a debut album that was short sharp shocks of literate new wave pop/noir that seemed to place them in that angular space beyond Buzzcocks with fellow travellers Wire and early XTC. Then, as a harbinger for the way their music would shapeshift, the introspective, moodier next two albums, ‘Seventeen Seconds’ and ‘Faith’, framed them as a parallel southern outpost of the darker, brave new post-punk world of Joy Division before ‘Pornography’ went deep into the art of darkness with its clattering rhythms and stark soundscapes.
It remains one of the great albums.
No band could stay in that space for too long, though, and they imploded, temporarily losing charismatic bassist Simon Gallup with Robert moving to the delightful Syd Barrett lysergic pop and occupying eighties Top Of The Pops space without losing any of that quark, strangeness and charm that was always core to their genius.
During this phase, Simon Gallup rejoined, bringing his exquisite melodic bass lines back with him. The band got hairier and wilder as albums tumbled past. They somehow broke out of their bedsit constituency and became one of the biggest bands in the world. Their new stadium live sets were immaculate displays of musical prowess and captured all their many moods. They seemed to have become a touring machine, and in recent years, it seemed with little hope of a new album.
But here it is, and its eight songs are perfectly placed to take you on their dark star trip. It may not be the double album that people were hoping for, but value is all about the right stuff and not loads of stuff. The eight tracks pull you into a deeply personal space and into the eye of an emotional hurricane. All the classic Cure hallmarks are there, from that aching bass masterclass to the minimalistic and powerful drum clatter (the drum sounds are great on this album – truly apocalyptic!) to Robert’s spiralling guitars and the American former Bowie axeman Reeves Gabrels lead lines that fit so well into the very English Cure soup. Robert Smith’s newly acquired classical piano parts add a new flavour to the mix whilst astonishingly, his pure voice is untainted by the years and has remained a constant since those long-lost days of the late seventies.
Opening up with ‘Alone’ and its apocalyptic imagery, the passage of time and the temporary nature of existence and permanence is all over this album. The track is the first ‘single’ from the album, and the seven minute slice of pounding melancholy floats way above the bickering pop space. It’s a post radio single that understands that music exists beyond the constraints of media constraints and floats in its own ether in the 21st century and exists on its own emotional terms.
Based on ‘Dregs’ – the Ernest Dowson poem, this is Smith going in deep, it’s like the classic Cure bleak house of ‘Pornography’ perhaps one of the most harrowing albums ever recorded with the widescreen vistas of ‘Disintegration’ creating a new terrain that ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ visits. A perfect opener that, like all the songs, thrives on its long intro demanding patience as it pulls you into its swirling, pounding emotional skree.
‘A Fragile Thing’ deals with the fragility of love and the inevitable end – an emotional space sat opposite to the rictus grin of most pop music but somehow, this is a pop music on its own terms, complete with a hook and a glimmer of hope in its lyrics of yearning for love until the very end. In all of pop’s endless posturing, the key inspirational pillars, like existence itself, always come back to sex, love and death and the music to capture it.
‘Warsong’ is a heavy workout that is hypnotic in its ambition, darkness and regret as Robert’s voice is full of emotion and despair as he sings beautifully of relationships and, perhaps, it can also be extrapolated as soundtracking the endless chaos of the world at large and the human need to fight driving us as much as the need for love. ‘Drone Nodrone’ is driven by prowling bass chords and somehow nods back to the earliest Cure in its shapeshifting shadows with the kind of chorus that made ‘Killing An Arab’ the band’s first crossover slice of pop/noir.
‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’ is the heart of the album, a song full of despair and the emotional angst at watching a loved one die in front of you with the attendant countdown of the breaths combined with the flailing inevitable and then the strange peace and emptiness of death as life ebbs from a close one. Musically and lyrically, the song captures that moment when someone who was once so alive and vibrant, perhaps like Robert’s older brother, slips away. It’s heartbreaking stuff built around Robert’s new skills as a classical piano player and a song of raw emotional honesty and power that it feels is perhaps what post-punk and The Cure have spent decades working towards. Answering the big generational questions like how do you deal with the temporary nature of existence and the heartbreak of life in groundbreaking music with none of the cliches? This was a journey we were all on after punk turned our heads, and few have made it to this point as creatively powerful as this. Now, we face our own mortality as the clocks tick tock away.
Some of the coolest moments on the album are where the band unzip their sound and recalibrate them in a different order, ‘All I Ever Am’ is another exquisite ebb and flow of instrumentation with the bass playing a fucked up lead line like a 21sct century take on ‘All Cats Are Grey’ over a pulsating string synth section and thundering shattered drum rhythms – it’s a hypnotic instrumental to and fro with that post punk maxim of every instrument playing lead and building a base for the aching and yet dark pop/noir vocal to emote in.
‘Endsong’ is perhaps the bleakest piece of pop culture poetry since Ian Curtis and Joy Division. A crescendo clattering drum laments about the end of everything and the shadowy grim reaper. It was always going to be the curtain call on an album that deals with a turbulent time in Smith’s life. ‘The future’s uncertain and the end is always near’, as Jim Morrison once sang – it’s the perfect gothic lament and so is Endsong and whilst the Cure were never Goth or certainly never Goff, they were always gothic in their grandeur and their dealing with the darkest shadows and turning them into stunning slices of great pop art.
For years we waited for the follow up to Pornography whilst enjoying and understanding all their curveballs and tangents. We surfed the pop period and loved the lysergic wonk of it all, gorged on the beauty and sadness of Disintegration, but here we are with a bleak album that dares to own up to the most profound truths in life with a stark yet melodic powerful music and those deeply personal gorgeous vocals.
Songs Of A Lost World is a stunning work that could be their own end song but we know the Cure better than that and there are more twists and turns to come…