Review Summary: A cure for ageing legs?
‘Bloodflowers’ was a failure. An enjoyable failure, but a failure nonetheless. It’s biggest fault was that Robert Smith was trying too hard to shift the band’s sound back to its gothic glory days, pushing for deliberately lengthy songs and heaps of self-loathing. In the end it was just too self-conscious to sound like the epic trilogy closer it was intended to be.
Fast-forward 4 years and The Cure returned to the studio and knocked out one of their quickest albums in years, recording in the spring of 2004 and releasing ‘The Cure’ just months later in June. The rapid production almost leads one to assume the band realised the biggest issue plaguing ‘Bloodflowers’ and did something about it - briskly piecing together a rather comfortable sounding track-list, without a trace of fuss or over-deliberation.
The results of this swift recording are telling. The Cure have rarely sounded as carefree and comfortable in their own skin as they do on this eponymous-titled 12th studio album, with each track seeming individual, rather than just another cog in the overall atmospheric machine. The songs aren’t interconnected or joined, nor is there a consistent theme or mood, which immediately makes the record different to its predecessor.
There’s likeable little pop tunes such as ‘Taking Off’, ‘(I Don’t Know What’s Going) On’ and ‘The End Of The World’, that don’t sound much different to any other song The Cure put out in the last 15 years, but that’s why they work - their steady guitar, synth backing and shrieking vocals are familiarly pleasant.
There’s also expectedly darker moments appearing wherever the group see fit, balancing out the poppy moments with something more concerned, such as the crawling, angular ‘Lost’, and the obligatory lengthy number, ‘The Promise’, which opens to Smith screaming into the microphone before a grim melody unfolds, with steady percussion and crunching guitars interjecting sporadically.
‘The Cure’ is not a great album, nor is it a terrible album. It’s just one of those take-it-or-leave-it type outings, were it’s best left up to the listener’s discretion whether he/she wishes to indulge in a solid, briefly enjoyable, yet un-compelling, slice of modern Cure. For those who never felt comfortable venturing further than ‘Disintegration’ or ‘Pornography’, give this a miss, but for the Cure fans irritated by that gap on the record shelf where the goths 12th studio LP should be; they should find enough here to satisfy more than just collective desires.
