The Cure
(Geffen) Finally, the feel-good album of the summer. Take it away, Robert Smith: “Death is with us all. We suck him down with our first breath, and spit him out as we fall.” Yikes! Unlike 2000’s elegiac Bloodflowers, weighted down with assumptions of the band’s expiring career, The Cure arrives at a high tide of interest and influence – just ask the Rapture, the Walkmen, or just about any band playing Emo’s this week. And Smith is feeling the love, even if he doesn’t quite understand it: “I can’t find myself … in the head of this stranger in love,” he sings on “Lost,” which opens the album with one of the Cure’s copyrighted four-minute crescendos. Seven songs later, on “(I Don’t Know What’s Going) On,” he’s still trying to figure it out as his mates pump out a shimmering melody of prime Head on the Door vintage. “Before Three,” “Taking Off,” and “Anniversary” are downright blissful, although two are written in the past tense. This is the Cure, after all, so it’s never all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. The howling “Us or Them” is one of the better fuck-off songs in recent memory; nimble “Never” details the tragedy of faulty timing. Brighter than Bloodflowers, denser than Wish, The Cure presents Smith as a wild-haired sorcerer’s apprentice, conducting another mad symphony of infatuation and angst – and not about to yield his baton to any of his worshipful whippersnappers. Once again, it’s opening time down on Fascination Street …
This article appears in July 30 • 2004.