From Far Out:
The Cure – ‘Mixes of a Lost World’ album review: A rhythmic expansion of the dark realm
Kelly Scanlon
When Robert Smith started receiving an influx of Songs of a Lost World remixes, he felt his world expanding. The Cure have always been prominent (and limitless) world-builders, but what about how these worlds are seen from the other side? What about when we’re let into the side of the Cure that they have no control over, the side entirely reinterpreted by those observing from the sidelines?
The beauty of Songs of a Lost World wasn’t that it proved the Cure still had it; it was all gorgeous hues of the band’s consistent sense of foreboding, the unveiling of impending finality that never revealed itself with enough clarity to know if it was actually real or imagined. This is where Lost World picks up, entrenched in the haze of the ambiguity that never fails to pull us into its rapture, acknowledging the familiarity without feeling too close to a shadow of its former self.
And through that seemingly endless journey of cloaked self-discovery, staring at blood-red moons, wondering “how I got so old”, Smith basked in the fatal beauty of presenting more questions than answers, thriving on vulnerability and suffering while spotlighting the most intricate experiences and feelings along the way. It’s immersive, but in a way that feels grittier in its own darkness, like finding meaning in the trenches of having absolutely nothing (“It’s all gone / No hopes, no dreams, no world”).
As such, a full, complete project like Lost World feels without the need for any kind of expansion, but we all know that finality hasn’t always been Smith’s strong suit. Ever the master of toying with incomplete albums, runtimes and the setbacks of getting it all wrong, Mixes of a Lost World feels like an entirely expected step, one that highlights all of Lost World‘s lost words in technicolour, storyboarding Smith’s inner mind with the freedom of unrestricted conventions.
And that means meandering the depths of the different parameters of dance music, giving Lost World a kind of intensified viscera that ventures beyond the walls of the source material. As Smith explained: “Just after Christmas, I was sent a couple of unsolicited remixes of Songs of a Lost World tracks and I really loved them. The Cure has a colourful history with all kinds of dance music, and I was curious as to how the whole album would sound entirely reinterpreted by others.”
Notable highlights are the ones that dramatise the original or heighten that sweet spot where the familiar foreboding comes to the shore, like Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Cinematic’ Remix of ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’, alongside the Orbital Remix of ‘Endsong’. The Twilight Sad Remix of ‘A Fragile Thing’ also gives it an inexplicably retro feel, while Mogwai’s ‘Endsong’ comes in like a storm, unforgiving, powerful from start to finish.
These 24 new versions hold their own as standalone and broader pieces to the puzzle, offering insight into new, previously undiscovered edges to Lost World, ones that offer more in the instrumental segments and the way they compound attention over Smith’s lyrics. Though these new elements rarely come close to the instrumental magic the Cure has already mastered, they certainly offer new avenues for exploration, letting you fester in those ambiguous realms for just a little bit longer.
Perhaps the star here is actually Deftones’ Chino Moreno’s take on ‘Warsong’, not just because of how much darker his composition makes the track feel but also because its added rhythmic cadences and pulsating notes drill in the meaningful urgency behind the track, giving it a more open relevance to today’s political climate and all the ways human conflict is tearing it down, detectable in the understated afflictions alone.
Just like the source material, these undeniable strokes of melancholy also give it an additional sense of vibrancy, taking the band’s original motifs without trying to turn them into something different, something far away from what makes them so great in the first place. Perhaps that’s the real beauty of Mixes; it takes what’s already there and enhances it, giving it more means for possibility beyond the world we’re already familiar with.
