From The Times:
The Cure: Songs of a Lost World review — a decaying masterpiece
On the goth rockers’ first album in 16 years, Robert Smith tackles the death of loved ones and his own demise in music of expansive sophistication
Will Hodgkinson
★★★★★
The 16-year wait for this long-promised album is finally over, and for a lot of that time the Cure’s most ardent fans were wondering what the band could possibly be doing. Was Robert Smith hanging upside down in a belfry night after night for inspiration before carving each lyric out on a gravestone?
The Cure have become the last word in gothic splendour, an institution of doom-laden, cross-generational appeal. As well as garnering enduring respect for keeping ticket prices affordable and their spirit of independence, the Cure encapsulates a certain romantic adolescent mindset, equal parts passion and pain, forever occupying a shadowy corner of the churchyard of life, misunderstood but poetic.
As it turns out, Smith and co were busy making their Dark Side of the Moon: an atmospheric, sophisticated, thoroughly English portrait of death, disintegration and things falling apart, rich in melodrama and bombast. “I could die tonight of a broken heart,” Smith sings, in that strangely youthful voice of his, on A Fragile Thing, a statement typical of an album on which everything is raised to heights of importance.
“The stars grow dim with tears … we toast the bitter dregs to our emptiness,” he adds on Alone, like a madman about to be strangled by the ivy that engulfs his ancestral home creeping through the window and around his neck. “Promise you’ll be with me in the end,” he pleads on And Nothing Is Forever, holding hands with his beloved as they step off this mortal coil. Strings swoop, harmoniums creak, guitars reverberate. It’s a decaying masterpiece.
As the title suggests, Songs of a Lost World is an album about facing up to the fact that your time has passed, the world you love and understand has gone, the very nature of your life is embedded into the reality of death.
Given that he is the 65-year-old leader of an Eighties goth rock band in an age when pop dominates, you can see why this is on Smith’s mind. The paradox is how young he sounds, not just in the urgency of his delivery but also in the teen-spirit lyrics, in which suffering takes on heroic importance.
The precedent here is the Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, which was equally informed with a horror of death and an encroaching irrelevance. Smith made that record when he was approaching the grand old age of 30. The difference this time is that he has experience of the subject he is writing about.
“Something wicked this way comes to steal away my brother’s life,” he sings on I Can Never Say Goodbye, against the sound of distant thunder. Smith’s elder brother Richard, who introduced him to alternative music, did indeed die in 2019, as did their mother and father.
That kind of straight-talking lyricism is typical of an album in which everything comes from experience. The eight songs here are long and involving, with bleak grandeur triumphing over anything resembling pop melody, but there is an emotional simplicity at the heart of each one that is entirely convincing.
The album finishes with Endsong; a ten-minute epic on which, after six minutes of pounding drums and mournful strings, Smith wonders what happened to the boy he once was, the world he belonged to and why he made the mistake of getting so old. As George Harrison once told us, all things must pass. On Songs of a Lost World Smith has not reached Harrison’s level of wisdom. He still wants to be the kid he once was, when everything was to play for. Who can’t relate to that? (Fiction)
