The Cure, "Songs of a Lost World"

This will be my first review of a new album release in about four years ... although one could say that it was sixteen years in the making.

The anticipation surrounding this album has drawn in many casual and lapsed fans.  Even without any new music, their profile has arguably never been higher thanks to regular touring, high profile festival appearances, the RnR Hall of Fame induction, and the overall appreciation of a still-functioning band whose enormous influence is still being felt.  For much of the 2010's, I had the sense that The Cure didn't need to record anything else, that they could continue indefinitely as a legacy act.  I'm thinking of the likes of Billy Joel, who hasn't released an album of new music in thirty years (and has no plans to do so) but sold out MSG monthly for years and received the most glowing reviews of his entire career. 

The new album is out and two more are reportedly on the way, so the Cure are very much a fully active band again.  The early reviews for "Songs of a Lost World" have been outstanding.  The new songs were centrepieces of their last world tour, and the lyrics are sobering takes on the incessant reality of death and aging in a broken, uncertain world.  The Cure are back to help us make sense of it all, people are ready and waiting for this album, and hoping for it to be a masterpiece.  

There has been a lot of criticism about the mixing of the album, and on my initial listen I agree with most of it.  It sounds squashed and overly compressed, the drumming is muffled and lacks punch, the synths are too upfront in the mix and have a confusingly preset quality to them, there is little of the high reverb ambience that I want from such an overwhelmingly sobering album.  

Despite those sonic issues, many truly great songs shine through.  Sometimes they imitate the funereal, dirge-like qualities of Joy Division's "Decades" (e.g. "Alone") and sometimes they beef up the doom-laden inevitability not unlike New Order's "In a Lonely Place" (e.g. "Endsong").  The mountains of synths covering "And Nothing Is Forever" produce one of the most lush and purely gorgeous backing tracks in the Cure's 40+ year recorded history. "Drone:Nodrone" distinguishes itself from the somber majority of the album by featuring a more muscular, funk metal sound.  Throughout the album, Robert Smith's voice is in pristine form.  Perhaps nothing is forever, as the album keeps telling us, but his unvarying voice is miraculously the one constant in an ever-evolving band.

Putting aside the production issues for the moment, this is a very good album, although not the classic I was expecting based on the tour recordings and the the pre-release hype.  When the Rolling Stones reformed for "Steel Wheels" and launched a record-breaking tour, everyone remembered that they were a singular band after they had lost their sense of purpose for much of the 1980's.  Starting with that album, and for much of the next fifteen years, critics and fans were on the lookout for the next classic Stones album, the one that would complete their journey from yesterday's legends to contemporary studio giants, irrespective of their remarkable concert tour successes .  Each album was hailed as the best since "Some Girls", or "finally, a Stones album that you don't need to make excuses for".  I think the Cure are firmly entrenched in that phase of their career.  Remarkably, the Stones in the 90's were a much younger band than the Cure is now.  That entire studio run of the Stones didn't add anything to their overall legacy, that vindicating return to form never happened.  Mick et al laughed all the way to the bank (and still are!).  But there was an outsized emphasis relevance through new studio material, and the Stones were judged accordingly.  If that was happening today, with the album in rapid decline as the definitive musical artifact, I think they'd be judged very differently.  

The Cure are one of those few remaining legacy bands who continue to be judged according to the old standards.  I think we've been here before.  "Bloodflowers" was expected to be a classic following the underwhelming "Wild Mood Swings".  It had the hyped up pedigree as the final album in the trilogy that began with "Pornography" and "Disintegration".  It's a good album and the Trilogy DVD is still one of the best projects they ever did, but who reps for "Bloodflowers" these days?  The self-titled album in 2004 was also praised by fans and earned respectable reviews.  It had Ross Robinson producing, adding a nu-metal sheen to the band's sound that at the very least made for an interesting pairing.  They headlined the Curiosa festival with a cadre of bands that owed them a debt creatively, and it all made perfect sense.  Old meets new, the Cure properly launch themselves into a 21st century context!  At the time I listened to the album a lot, but who listens to it today?   During the "Songs of a Lost World" tour, they played 60 different songs across 89 shows, but not a single one of them from "The Cure" (according to setlist.fm).  

"Songs of a Lost World" feels like a big deal now, not least because it's been such a long wait.   But who will be listening to it in ten or twenty years?   As much as there is to like about this album, I can't say that I hear anything "permanent" about it.  That said, much like the Stones beginning with "Steel Wheels", does that even matter?  Focusing too much on the quality of a new Cure album, and evaluating their worth based on that, might mean that we were asking the wrong questions all along.