The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World
‘The life of the dead endures in the memory of the living’ - Cicero
It hurts.
That might be enough.
One enters the world of truth, of what cannot be denied, of streams of consciousness that daze, freeze and freeze without the possibility of reply.
A plunge to the mind, rather than the heart: The Cure are back, but only discographically speaking, and Old Scribe does not refer to the band's live activity so much as to the meaning, affection, adoration and need to bring that uniqueness to the place of unyielding continuity. With this combo, there is no such thing as separation and distance.
A problematic album, an exercise in truth that has nothing artistic about it but the form, yet there is no doubt that what one hears and reads really does sound like a deposition, written and played, of total surrender before the imminent, as if the treatise of human logic should be certified in this downdrift.
Suffering explodes with class and carpets of sensations stuck to the game of mockery, vapours, and continuous loops that characterise the eight tracks of SOALW, the perfect number because it also encompasses a minute length that is only apparently not abundant (forty-nine minutes), demonstrating, instead, total disarmament before this volcano, slow but not very slow in its liturgical foam, which seems to eventually submerge us all, without mercy.
What remains is the consolation of a pen, that of Robert Smith, capable of bringing out sweetness and understanding, without, however, eliminating his new loneliness, his bewilderment and those questions that in the end are unbearable boulders for those who, like him, are endowed with sensitivity.
Claustrophobic and dirty, with the paintings falling, one after the other, on the asphalt of our worries, in an embrace, forced, aimed at finding an impossible support.
The sound, its research, the firm conviction that Disintegration has taught us that long introductions are not just preparatory acts is evident, but here at last, they become attestations of a work that knows how to exclude the word in order to centralise attention, exhausting, unnerving those who do not know the preciousness and value of patience.
It enervates those who do not grasp the infinite nuances of the inputs and outputs of the instruments in order to manipulate everything only in an apparent static manner. With the pop side dead and buried, all that remains is to crouch down in the nuances of existence, in the never planned counting of lost affections, in a glance at the past that highlights emotional voids: this is what the leader's words, but also the music, lead us to, in an algebraic and contiguous impasto of the 1989 album.
The most rebellious act of this fourteenth work is the nakedness, the concession of doubts, the gaping memory like the craters that exhibit the emptiness within (the death of parents, brother, etc.) that are the outpost of a mutant identity that has within it the after-effects of a boiling past full of wounds (let us not forget Pornography but above all The Top) and that finds the compulsory stopping, of a vision that excludes the mode of childhood.
An adult record for dying people.
A broadside with delicate fabrics, so as not to frighten, so as not to quickly increase dissent: in the end, the real protagonist of the whole is Robert's voice (again and again and again), here paralysed even before being paralysing, in a mnemonic ordeal that unrolls the parchment of memories in his still powerful and scratchy uvula, as if the rust found, in those vibrations, the pass of credibility.
Overwhelming, dry, high-pitched and maddening, this gift from heaven genuflected before a rhythmic construction at least inclined to slowness, with two exceptions, to lift the body but not the mood, relegating the eventual dance to a continuation, only different, of a slump in full discomfort and awareness.
The Cure's saddest album?
Definitely. It has nothing to do with operating systems, but rather with the intensity of an evident evil that has no possibility of dissolution: in front of the hard shell of death, there is no art capable of challenging it.
The presence of two instruments in clamorous excess becomes inevitable: the keyboard and the piano, where often the samplings show us phrasings of classical music stuffed with modernity.
Not only Roger, but also Smith: here is a compensation, a laboratory that sees two suffering souls (let's not forget the Cure keyboardist's blood cancer) on a Nordic pilgrimage, to defeat the idea that Coldwave is only a sheet of ice capable of making us dance.
The band decides to restore the final moment of Sinking to generate a chameleon-like chaos, coloured with all shades of grey, as a point of contact with a cover that already makes us realise how present in the work is this sense of precipitation and stability that only stone can give.
A 1975 work that seems to be the interpretive key to this agglomeration of impervious consciousnesses that need music, more than words, to give time (understood as rhythm) the dramatic sense of staticity.
This explains the repetitive riffs, the brevity of the fantasy, the song form reduced to the bare minimum, the intention to embalm the fantasy as an inappropriate enemy.
The compositions impressively delineate the range of these ten years in which everything has unfolded: a tortoise that has come from the English capital to the cliffs of Dover, to bear witness, through music, to the fallacious intention of eternity.
And on this topic the band has built four records: you cannot deny DNA, which is impossible, especially for those who have always been afraid of senile dementia.
It is in this conceptual cavern that one identifies the necessity of not being in a hurry to listen to the queen, that voice on which many have built a bond. Here, even though it is only the second time in his 40-year career, everything was written by Robert Smith and he was the first to decide to perform the operation that requires the listener to be able to take in what is happening and not what will happen: one of the many lessons of this album.
This transfers, gives birth to and puts an end to every dream and ambition, and in this it is more devastating than Pornography, because it does not require the soul's aching delirium, but rather a devastating and imposing shrewdness called surrender.
Music makes one surrender.
Like words.
In a Fellini-esque playground with the gothic sense of Tim Burton, for a splash of poorly preserved toxic oxygen.
It has nothing to do with what you would like to hear, but with what you define: funky comes in and surprises, rock does the same in the only episode granted to it, for the purity of a sound concept that has nothing to do with messages: Robert is not looking for an audience, but rather for a mute mirror that screams without sound, and he, like a delirious yet lucid magician, transforms it all into a vocabulary from which we are forced to learn terms that this time, despite having heard them pronounced so many times by himself, find an elastic form that overrides security.
Songs Of A Lost World re-presents the textures of Wish, only for that instant in which bitterness indulges in a glass of whiskey, to resume the thunder of a song that you will not struggle to imagine as aged in time.
It also gathers the desire to thin the production that has always tried to give life to dying compositions: everything becomes alienation with dried flowers, with the distributor of ideas in reserve because if you're out of petrol it doesn't mean you don't have a car...
The Cure seem to be dying, tired, challenged but, more than anything, excited: the basis of a perverse joy for the many fans, who, without respect, will throw themselves into singing these lyrics to testify their love. That love involves silence, respect, study and the identification of this stripping of the soul mentioned above.
It is art like the ancient art, the art that turns its back, that does not listen, that offers its back because it is not interested in confrontation, in a deadly form of rejection of rejection, with no need to sink its claws into centred nihilism.
One finds oneself with sounds very akin to the 1990s (in one track Never Enough seems resurrected and almost happy to be scratching again...), but with the certainty that it is a perverse game aimed at historicising that era in that there were still souls present and decisive.
A work resembling an abacus that shoots missiles, slow, sweaty, never wavering: you can adore it as well as detest it as people with a stench under their noses would do, nevertheless you cannot deny the fatigue and the immersion in the circuits where the light of life finds itself bowing before that of death.
In the same sky cataclysms happen, which in this album are played out in the game of despondency.
It weeps the music, the voice, the soul, in this wandering that offers a traumatic aspect however prone to concession, to refreshment that does not console and gives a few more years to live.
The lyrics are handles, paths, tales (even intimate ones), like scours that do not have the right side to be judged: Smith's ability to flirt with an incandescent but unattainable beauty has remained and is perhaps even more voluminous.
And then him, the drumming, a vine of powerful content, which for once does not make one regret that of Boris Williams: it almost certainly happens because there are points of contact and, first and foremost, an artistic freedom never received before.
The rhythmic games are metallic wings: it is the first time since Jason Cooper joined the line-up that the focus is on the sounds, dutifully dark and full of arthritis, to better configure the ageing of the subject, of the secret concession of a man and his group here more cohesive than ever in eliminating doubts.
And the truths shown would seem to facilitate comparison, precisely, with Disintegration.
Not for the Old Scribe.
That episode, unjustly considered a masterpiece, presented the forced existence of different songs, and comprised (certainly) a united block, but it was evident that there were good grapes and less.
There were fillers and diversions, singles made to climb the charts.
What does Alone have to do with that album? A single that, although reminiscent in the mode of moments from that record, is a song that afflicts, impresses, discolours the mood, swells the air with multiple toxins. Only the Cure, on this journey into complete maturity, can afford such an operation, like Indians with arrows still full of vigour, in slow motion...
The infinity of eternal life is celebrated, the bewilderment of presence waiting to extinguish, and the music sounds like a modern rosary, with unhinged impulses , parchments and lime pieces falling on the epicness of a work that for bravura and validity can live with the band that with The Top made its artistic journey finished from the point of view of sincerity in search of maintenance. Subsequent productions showed strength and extraordinary planning, making instinct and impelling hustle and bustle die away.
Which you find here, slowed down but alive.
The presence of camouflaged classical music becomes intrigue and chastisement, playfulness and obedience, in an obvious contrast that brings down the dream, the real protagonist of the album.
It is revealed in its obstruction, negation, in the feline manner of verses that do not mention it but make its fragrance felt, resulting in Robert Smith's tears becoming the stage where words find light and apotheosis.
They become the moments when the singer decides to immerse them in the dilating vase of memories and stories in which the breaths of those one has loved no longer exist (the reference to the brother is truly fitting, as well as the square root of a pain that is not yet in the process of being amicably ascertained), in order to use a (often sampled) violin on which to draw weakness and deliver it.
And then a marvellous thing happens, elegantly, covertly, like a live suicide: the public concession of a pact with fear that, starting from the need to repeat the same harmonic turn, comes down to words that use the same modality. It confirms, crumbles the fantasy and offers the limit, even that of art.
Another aspect is the set list: divided by colours, by moods and flashes, to give the eight episodes the chance to play on their own like bats in compulsory flight, with the lanes of the caves not allowing them to veer, because the album can only be listened to by following this order in order to have the illusion of managing it, of understanding it and even worse of possessing its meaning.
But...
Useless: SOALW is a labyrinth that retreats, it does not allow you to run, to look for loopholes, like an electric chair settles in the skull before the body and then, yes, it really hurts.
A work that certainly shows some limitations, but which lives on a great sincerity. And for that one can only applaud....
Song by Song
1 - Alone
A sweet feather, in the form of a hug, opens its wings to enclose us in its intimate smile: the opening is a flow of classical music with the make-up suitable for a special occasion, which is to give us the first indications of what will happen. Minimalist, with its pace that gradually collects blueberries of sound, the song takes us back to the climax of Wish with the slowness that hypnotizes and seduces.
Then comes the voice and it's joy, while the notes of a lucid mind melt in the throat that once again knows how to make the sound a forest waiting for the cry...
2 - And Nothing Is Forever
The range of musical harmony increases, with a melancholic mix given by strings and piano, like a captivating anticipation of an almost explosion, a growth that makes us vibrate, in pure Cure style: the uniqueness of this band has multiple truths and the song shows us one, through a statement that reveals the ancient fear of abandonment, and it is precisely in that context that the music becomes nineteenth-century with transistors, to better connect the breadth of this path...
3 - A Fragile Thing
A moment of lightness, an almost encounter with the pop spiral: be careful, it's a bluff as everything weighs even if the melody and the voice seem close relatives of a sunbeam. The chorus is enough to understand how being sly allows the band to play, where instead the text exhausts and wears out: and to think that there will be those who will take it for the softest piece of this work. Apparently it seems to listen to a scrap, revised and corrected, of a part of Wendy Time, with the addition of flowers and cruel petals, while the notes make playful grimaces...
4 - Warsong
The social commitment of the lyrics allows the song to be vibrant, connected to reality, with great energy and probably one of the most beautiful of the band of the last thirty years. In its mystery the muscles reveal the ancient rock side, with the hatred of the lyrics that makes the entire listening scorching, but with class.
5 - Drone:Nodrone
The funky of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me returns, with the added sound vibration of Never Enough: when the watts stretch their arms, the impact becomes a force and the listening a moment of ecstasy, soaked in free-falling clouds…
6 - I Can Never Say Goodbye
The roar of The Same Deep Water As You opened its melancholic rains. And it returns in this new episode: there is no armistice and peace in the pain for the loss of a brother and the song confirms Robert Smith's incredible ability to write lyrics that frame mourning, confusion and regret. Just like the music, a caress on a rocking chair that seems to be able to stage what the Cure were like more than thirty years ago: truly touching…
7 - All I Ever Am
Simon Gallup returns to push, to launch the band and it is hypnosis at high rhythms, with guitars full of rust and the bewitching voice in a baritone tone that amazes and makes everything a remarkable earthquake. The feeling of positivity of the guitars remains imprinted in the listening, while the words face (as only Smith can do at these levels) the tension for the fear of death, with time that is thinning out more and more. The last moment of the album in which you still have some defenses ...
8 - Endsong
Here everything collapses: a polyphonic apparatus, following a long act of tiny variations, makes it almost impossible to sustain the introduction, because the drama that can already be felt paralyzes. And when Robert Smith's voice arrives, everything becomes temporal, with the notes that take away the sky in one of the most touching songs ever released by the English band. Chaos finds a lair and unrolls, to then curl up again not in a game but in an obligatory summary mode. And that's how tears flow with listening, while it seems to present a song that could have replaced several of Disintegration. Death returns, to make the tension epic and sacred, with the boundaries of safety abandoning the breaths. Epic, thunderous, with cymbals and tarred guitars, this delirium of tensions finds its emissary that makes the awareness of the speed with which life abandons us truly bitter, doing so, by contrast, with a semi-ballad.
Alone and Endsong are the boundaries of this return, Siamese brothers of an unshakable faith: that of a conscious journey while it is time to go to sleep…
