Italy - Rockol (positive), Sound Magazine (positive), Wuz (No clue! See comment section for a translation).
US - Cauldron (positive), Northstar (3/10), College Times (3/?), Groove Vault (no idea, not really a review), The Quad (positive).
UK - The Guardian (3/5).
Australia - The Sunday Mail (3/4).
Spain - EP3/El Pais (3/5).
Fans - Clockwise Cat.
(Thanks Kate, Heather, Laura, Alison, and Sharon @ Charlotte Sometimes)
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From Sound Magazine (Italy):
ReplyDeleteThe British Cure with this thirteenth album shows their more reflective and mature side.
They left the keyboards and rely on the electric guitar by Paul Thompson, who enlivens the melody.
There is certainly a new rock cut, which in some songs comes close to pop without debase.
With those thirteen traces is clear that the past restlessness has been filtered by the maturity and by the experience, after all their strength is to reborn, to risk and to experiment.
This shows once more that the new groups still have much to learn also from The Cure.
From WUZ (Italy):
seems more like an article (very inconclusive)...doesn't say a word about the record itself
translation:
Let's start from the end. A review on the contrary.
The problem is not the quality of the Cure record; the problem is: who cares of The Cure today.
I mean, apart from their fan. That are a lot, and always thirsty.
Seeing from another angle, the point is: the pop world still got space for The Cure and their fantasy?
Viewed from above, as in a big airplane trip, the pop music world (i don't use the word rock, i don't want to be reductive) seem a big desert or a great Las Vegas. Something homogeneous that doesn't leave hope for creativity.
And so: The Cure, what will they do of their old age? And how they will manage it, in front of a music world that changed in their hands, and it's not anymore the one of 20years ago?
A problem of adaptation, or a choice of life. Anyway, an important step for a band that, with U2, Depeche Mode and few others, has redesigned the grammar of pop music, without if and without but.
4:13 Dream, from the marketing point of view, absorbs the experience of three decades of "intelligent astuteness" and plays a card that in the nineties has made the luck of many groups. The card of the "seriality" of the singles that, month after month, got the "teaser" function for the whole record. And so, in 4 months, we saw the pubblication of four singles, one different from the other that, as four advertising postcards, said "here's to you 4:13 Dream, the new work of The Cure".
Singles that however have not allowed us, till now, to appraise in its entirety a record that makes worth to the history of The Cure.
Cure that with this album have done 13.
13 records of which, at least five, for the pop epoch.
Thanks to Laura for the translations.
ReplyDeleterather inconclusive indeed - as most italian things I may add(don't shoot, I'm italian). my feeling is that they have heard the singles but not the album.
ReplyDeleteThose damn Giallo movies, so hard to figure out... if there's anything to figure out at all.
ReplyDeleteTranslation of the EP3/El Pais review:
ReplyDeleteInertia and Style
Robert Smith will be 50 in 2009. Half a century of life and more than 30 of career of a strange and almost autistic Briton that has become a style in himself, and who gets every single album he makes to become in the long run in a landmark in the history of pop, no matter how low it is. Therefore it doesn't matter that this album is boring, that nothing stands out, seems bright, or appears to be a summing of remainings. It's a Cure album, and in five years we will be able to see its greatess. Because in The Cure the whole is always more important than the summing of the parts, and everytime we have thought any of their recordings were bad we have been wrong. Summing up, this thirteenth album is mediocre for The Cure. However, The Cure, even with Smith not working at full tilt, is a great band.
(Thanks to Sharon for the translation)
I'm at the point that I can't read any more of these reviews anymore.
ReplyDeleteThe album is great & that's all I need to know!