From Brooklyn Vegan:
Review: The Cure's 'Songs of a Lost World' is a doomy, gloomy near-perfect return to form
Bill Pearis
How perfect does Robert Smith’s voice still sound? Most of his ’80s contemporaries’ pipes are shadows of what they once were, but on The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World, this is the voice you remember from “Lullaby,” “Hot Hot Hot,” “A Forest,” “The Caterpillar”; the quirks, the falsetto, the growls, the personality, the anguish and other emotions, it’s all still here. Likewise, Songs of a Lost World is The Cure you remember, especially if you’re a fan of the dark stuff. There’s no attempt to be hip with the kids, no sugary sore thumb stabs at the pop charts, just 49 minutes of gray sky melancholy, largely inspired by the death of his mother, father and brother, all of whom he lost in the 16 years since The Cure’s last album.
The desire to call Songs of a Lost World The Cure’s best album since Disintegration, or at least Wish, is there. That can be debated — Bloodflowers and 4:13 Dream may have gotten better with age (their Ross Robinson-produced 2004 self-titled album has not) — but this is definitely the most cohesive and concise since their 1989 masterpiece. It’s their shortest since 1985’s The Head on the Door and while the songs are long, the fat has been trimmed, with a fully realized dark atmosphere permeating every second, and nothing to lighten the mood. Smith called it “merciless” when the band were still working on it in 2019 but unlike Pornography, this isn’t unrelenting despair. These nine songs are thoughtful, heartfelt ruminations of mortality and loss and remembering those who are gone, not a lost soul wondering “why I am still here?” Songs of a Lost World feels like Smith is both giving Cure fans what they what want while making the album he needed to make.
That distinction is felt from with start: “Alone” is very clearly in Disintegration territory but the sound is modern; the synths are pastoral, the bassline owes a little to Twin Peaks, drums crash like waves on rocks, and little atmospheric touches swirl around your head. That you have to wait half the song’s six-minute run time for Robert Smith’s vocals to enter the scene only makes the payoff better. “This is the end of every song that we sing,” Smith wails. “The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears.” Despite being six and a half minutes long, “Alone” almost feels short given how quickly it wraps up once Smith does start singing, but it makes more sense as the intro to the album, as he guides us down a dark, beautiful path.
“And Nothing Lasts Forever,” up next, is the album’s prettiest song, a swaying promise to a friend to be with them when they die, about the acceptance of death, and “a memory of the first time in the stillness of a teardrop / As you hold me for the last time in the dying of the light.” With piano dancing around the synth strings, it’s also the album’s warmest, most romantic moment, a fond memory that cycles back around like its melody. Things then pick up with “A Fragile Thing,” the closest Lost World comes to a pop song, very classic Cure with Simon Gallup’s bass leading the charge, tom-heavy drumming, and lyrics that read like a letter from an ex-lover (“‘every time you leave me is a lie’ she said”). Featuring the album’s best chorus, this one could’ve been on Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.
At the center of Lost World are the two bleakest, stormiest moments. “War Song” is a tempest of clattering drums, pizzicato strings (think “Lullaby”), dirgey, grungy guitars, and an low undercurrent of reed organ as Smith details a broken, permanently damaged relationship. “Drone:Nodrone” is all encroaching paranoia (“I’m breaking up again, I can feel it in the air”), all searing rock guitars, hammering drums, and Smith’s most impassioned vocal performance. Between the drumming and the way he singsl “Down! Down! Down!,” it feels like close cousin to “The Hanging Garden.”
On the other side of that thunder is Songs of a Lost World‘s most personal song, “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” which is a stylized account of the night his older brother, Richard, died in 2019. Based around a simple piano hook, Smith mostly lets the music do the talking, creating a fog of doom and gloom, guitars and keyboards crashing like waves on a rocky sea, hitting as he sings, “Something wicked this way comes from out the cruel and treacherous night / Something wicked this way comes to steal away my brother’s life.”
Death hangs over Songs of a Lost Word, but so does the moon. The working title was Live From the Moon, and Smith has spoken of the effect the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing had as a 10-year-old boy, and how the 50th anniversary of that event in 2019 brought those feelings back. The title may have changed, but the moon is still very much central to the album, referenced in its final two songs of the album. “I am the sum of my memories,” Smith says of the windswept “All I Ever Am,” adding “at the same time, my memories themselves are being changed by who I am now.”
The moon landing is the direct inspiration for “Endsong” which brings the album full circle on a glacial note. “I’m outside in the dark, staring at the blood red moon, remembering the hopes and dreams I had and all I had to do,” Smith sings after a six minute intro. This and “Alone” were designed as bookends to the album, with similar song structure, pace, themes and even direct lyrical callbacks. “Endsong” is heavier, though, and more cinematic in scope, taking 10 minutes to build to its crescendo, and by the end Smith is resigned to fate. “It’s all gone / left alone with nothing / the end of every song.” The song became The Cure’s final main closer on their 2022/2023 Shows of a Lost World tour and it’s the perfect end to one of the Cure’s best records.
Robert Smith has said there could be two more Cure albums on the way, with Lost World‘s follow-up nearly finished, and the one after that at least planned out. But if this was to be the last in their discography, it would make for a satisfying closing chapter to the band’s story, wrapped up in black bow.