by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
The Cure’s most enduring feature-turned-strength over the years has been their uncompromising streak. There’s no telling what the music will sound like exactly — if it will mine a particular mood, be an eclectic mix of songs, or have an interest in hooks. The actual sound of the songs, though they have to be good, is secondary to the sound of Robert Smith himself. It’s comforting, then, to hear The Cure’s first album in 16 years and Smith sounds like he always has, as captivating as ever, the challenging parts of his voice less challenging after decades of his songs seeping into the pop cultural consciousness.
At a compact eight songs, Songs of a Lost World doesn’t waste any time. The tight sequencing is part of the record’s success, and it’s been a tactic used by bands to great effect — trim down the songs on the comeback record, give them a concentrated burst of what the band is — and one the Cure has been using since early career highlights like Faith and Pornography. It largely works. The songs all have a place on the record, the lyrics so unselfconscious of the time that’s passed between records that you forget whatever expectations you might have had.
The Cure have been playing a lot of these songs live for some time now, and while layered, there is a directness to the parts that suggest the music wasn’t particularly labored over. It feels natural, like a band should. The instruments invent shifting soundscapes that serve to reharmonize the melodies as they repeat, even while the harmony itself is shared by the interplay between keys, bass, and six-string bass. Each instrument stakes its claim in the mix, most notably the melodic six-string bass that’s been a part of the Cure’s sound since Faith. In its earliest uses, the extra low end added a murkiness that threatened to overwhelm the songs. Here, Smith uses it to great effect, playing buzzy, sustained melodies under the rumble of Simon Gallop’s bass with an economy totally unlike the relentless downstrokes seen on Faith. It gives the album a dense low-end but a spacious midrange that is primarily occupied by Smith’s voice, static synths for tension, and fluttering keys for texture.
It’s tempting to see this as a return to form because of the way this parallels the Cure’s early goth highwater marks, but there’s none of the brashness or melodrama of their earliest work. If anything, it’s lyrics like Pornography’s opening, “Doesn’t matter if we all die,” that he spends the album examining. “Alone” sets the tone with slow moving, interlocking melodies and Smith reflecting on loss of identity as the years have gone on and the world outside himself has become unfamiliar. “We toast with bitter dregs / to our emptiness,” he sings, both cutting and wistful. Songs of a Lost World isn’t exactly a death album, but the way the death of loved ones lingers gives even seemingly celebratory sentiments an acerbic bent. The whole album is more or less a dark night of the soul — when the people who’ve always been there are dying, what should it feel like to go on without them?
The album’s only misstep comes in the form of “Warsong,” which isn’t necessarily less honest than the rest of the songs, but is certainly less personal and detracts from the album’s specificity. It doesn’t ask much of Smith to denounce war as an inevitability, something to be disgusted with but not affected by, and it doesn’t ask much of the listener to agree with him. But as far as observations on how the world around you has become difficult to recognize, it’s one of the more vague angles on the topic and sticks out for not having much to say.
“Drone:Nodrone” makes a stronger impression and is easily the catchiest song on the album, Smith rattling off anxieties in a higher energy cadence as he throws his hands up and admits maybe it’s been a futile exercise to try and make sense of a world that makes you recoil. There’s no resolving this — the people you love leave, the world you know transforms before your eyes. By the time we get to “Endsong” and Smith takes stock around him, it comes to mirror the sentiment of “Alone” on the chorus: “It’s all gone, it’s all gone / Nothing left of all I loved.” The image of Robert Smith as some sort of displaced alien is a poignant one and it ends the album on an impressively dour note, totally unlike the triumphant opening of “Alone.”
The biggest difference between Songs of a Lost World and the rest of the Cure’s 21st century albums is a renewed sense of focus and an awareness of their strengths. The songs take their time to unfurl, but the melodies are strong and the interplay pushes it a cut above pop albums of its ilk and their last few records, too. It’s another Cure album; they all have a place, but it’s joyous to hear Smith doing some of his most vital work in decades. He’s not reinventing what he does, but he’s finding that he didn’t quite nail what or how he said what he said before. He’s got more perspective now, so somewhat reluctantly, he tries again. It’s an admirable place to find any artist with a career as diverse and wide reaching as The Cure’s.