Album / Polydor / 01.11.2024
Post punk goth
Here we are. After sixteen years of waiting, the Arlesian is coming to an end. Promised by Robert Smith for a long time, rejected time and time again, we must admit one thing: we had stopped believing in this fourteenth album. And yet. By putting its title back on the line, the band reminds us that until now we had to go back to the last century to find its last true masterpiece (Disintegrationif it still needs to be named). There were a handful of honorable records afterwards, but the legend was now written elsewhere: on stage, where the group has always worked wonders. Like during the last European tour two years ago, where five of the new songs were unveiled. The shaggy-haired singer having lost his parents and brother in recent years, Songs Of A Lost World could only be an album of mourning. A black, precious, almost testamentary album. It could be the last album of the Cure and even, somewhere, the last album of humanity, however imperfect and fragile it may be. Eight tracks for almost fifty minutes of music, an ideal form for a farewell. Unless it's a new start.
More elegiac than ever, far from the hit factory that the group sometimes was in the 80s, these songs from a lost world are austere, almost dry. However, the lush arrangements give them a certain warmth, or rather a scale, sometimes grandiose, sometimes pompous. The pieces follow one another… and are still very similar. More than a collection of songs, it is rather a monolith, erected on the altar of a career spanning almost half a century. Half a century of dreams and magic, of neuroses and melancholy too. The Cure actually does what we expect from a Cure album, at least in its most contemplative and obscure facet. No real surprises, except to find these sixty-year-olds at the top of their form. Smith's voice, timeless and unalterable, always touches the heart, and sometimes even still brings tears. The surgical precision of Simon Gallup's bass playing also works wonders alongside Jason Cooper's fiery and organic drumming. The keyboards of the discreet Roger O'Donnell, sometimes a little undermined by textures from another age, coat everything and even offer Reeve Gabrels, Bowie's ex-collaborator on the six-string, a large space for his talkative but surprisingly consistent with these new compositions. A bit as if this grandiloquent touch revealed yet other rough edges of these epic pieces imbued with great lyricism. Warsongthe top of the record, reminds us that the group is as good in its minimalist leanings as in its electric, dense and feverish escapades. 'All we will ever know, is bitter ends for we are born to war’the time is therefore still not for peace. Neither with yourself, nor with others. But this time, the collective wins, even if Smith signs the entire album with his own hand. In his lyrics, the use of the first person plural pronoun is omnipresent, even more so than the subjectivity of 'I' which is so dear to the romantic ideal. It couldn't be otherwise for a record that begins with these words: 'This is the end of every song that we sing’. Before continuing a little further, still in Alone : ‘We were always sure that we would stay the same’. This is good because they are the same.
Gothic icons, slayers of a now intergenerational spleen, The Cure cannot be remade like that. First of all, there are his heartbreaking love songs: And Nothing Is Foreverwhere Smith depicts his fear of growing old alone, without his loved one, or even A Fragile Thingwhere he directly lends his voice to the words of his muse. A harsh, uneasy title, between passionate declaration, bitter observations, reproaches and fatalities. Drone:Nodroneapart from its rather wobbly side, has the merit of offering great energy and a heady melodic gimmick, just like the melancholic I Can Never Say Goodbyededicated to the missing brother of Robert Smith. All I Ever Amthe weakest song on the record, sounds like a desperate attempt to escape the passing of time. But we must not forget that, among the Cure, the gently kitsch side can quickly leave you behind if you are not absorbed by the deadly swamps of melancholy. For the others, we will savor the closing piece Endsong which, in addition to its more than six minutes of appetizer (!), immediately rises among the most ambitious songs of the group, always looking towards its own twilight: 'It’s all gone […] left alone with nothing’.
But all this is not nothing, since all this is not in vain. If it's the end of a world, the end of an era perhaps, it's certainly not the end of the Cure. Sometimes disappointing, often captivating, the treatment has only just begun: here is a disc which cannot leave any stone unturned.
Photo : Sam Rockman
