It’s like 4 pm and this new Cure album Songs Of A Lost World could not have landed on a better day for me personally (thank you Bob). It’s a Scorpio new moon, emotions are running rampant, the veil is ozemps thin, and the shadow is fucking popping up to the surface like
Or mine is anyway! Shouts to my boy Carl Jung. I’ve already cried like four times today and the night is young honey. And thank god, this is the perfect soundtrack for that grappling with the deep dark ugly parts of yourself you don’t want to look at let alone give a great big hug to (as my therapist once advised me to do and I was like what bitch but then I dutifully imagined myself putting an arm around this shadowy shameful ghoul Yasi whilst we were inexplicably sitting on a cliff and then I immediately burst into hideous Kim Kardash tears).
But this is not about me this is about The Cure and their new album which is incredibly good in the way that it just frankly has no business being as a late stage career album. As a scholar of late career rock music it gives me no pleasure to report that 90% of it, no matter how genius or iconic the band was in their prime, is garbaggio. At best it’s tepid trash at worst its like so humiliating it is almost legacy-erasing (uno dos tres catorce etc). Not this one though!!!
I guess if you’ve been grappling with death in your music since 1977 (1973 if we’re counting “Obelisk”) when you finally get to the fourth quarter of your life and experience real profound loss, you make this album, the album you were building up to since the day you dropped “Easy” from your name. An album that builds upon your past work but also at the same time somehow distills it down. This is Cure concentrate. Robert Smith sounds exactly the same as he did forty years ago except EXCEPT now you can hear the distance between the imagined end and the real end has shrunk down to a sliver. This album lives in that sliver (no Billy Baldwin).
One knife of a piece of information: Robert Smith’s beloved older brother Richard, who he called “the guru” as a child and who, along with his sister, was in Robert’s very first band (The Crawley Goat Band), passed away in recent years and it was his death that inspired the track “I Can Never Say Goodbye.” You don’t really need to know that for it to punch you right in the gut but knowing it did make my second and third (okay and fourth fifth and sixth) listen(s) permeate deeper into my tender emotional core. The whole album is beautiful as one piece, but some of the songs, like that one, and “And Nothing Is Forever” and “Endsong,” are for me, god tier Cure songs, on par with the high points of the rest of their long and high-point filled discography.
Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys said that every successful band has an Imperial Phase, the period in which a musical artist is regarded to be at their commercial and creative peak simultaneously. The Cure’s Imperial Phase has passed and guess what I don’t think Robert Smith fucking cares. The trouble with so many artists is they refuse to accept the new phase and grasp at relevance in ways that border on criminal (self-inflicted elder abuse) and they do themselves such a disservice because as this ass fuck New Moon seems hell bent on showing me, you cannot create (or even be) from a place of inauthenticity. And guess what bitch not accepting yourself exactly as you are (ugly disgusting shameful shadow ghouls and all) is inauthentic as hell. Sorry if I sound like an entire fucking aisle of HomeGoods pillows but sometimes you have to cry your way to that live laugh love place (authentic!!!).
Without too close of inspection, this album does what the best Cure albums do for me, which is to elicit a sense of the bittersweet, of romantic loss (and of course the love that came before the loss). But if you listen closer you realize the album is dealing with mortality in a way that is both nuanced and fragmented, crystalline and confused. What I’m saying is we’ve come a long way from “Yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die.”
It makes sense that you could confuse the two. Love is the projection of the Self onto the other (as a way to ultimately connect with the divine) and the embedded threat of loss (of the relationship, but ultimately of the projected Self) is so throat-closingly scary because it mimics death. It IS a death, the loss of that Self projected, the end of the brush with the divine. It’s not so different from facing up to the facts that all Selves are temporary. (What is this bitch ON about).
Anyway to wrap up here because I got myself five different pints of ice cream and two bottles of Cameron Diaz wine to ride out the New Moon emotional storm, the thing is that in my opinion all late stage career albums are dealing with mortality, even the ones who refuse to acknowledge the passage of time. Avoidance is still a reaction. It’s just that the good ones get up in the shadow and put their arm around the ugliness, the truth. Like… “I'm outside in the dark wondering how I got so old.”
Anyway TGIF!!!
