The Cure Creates an Unrelentingly Sad and Singular Universe on ‘Songs for a Lost World’: Album Review
variety.comA.D. Amorosi If I told you 40 years ago, when the Cure was in the midst of its new-wave wonder moment, that the band would craft an inventively elegiac epic like “Songs for a Lost World” — a singular record worthy of face-soaking tears — you would have broken my teasing comb and melted down my Kohl eyeliner.
Though the bleakly beloved Robert Smith was notorious for tensely flanged, existential rants such as “One Hundred Years” and the controversial “Killing an Arab,” they were also the sugar-sweet weirdos behind the cartoony likes of “Love Cats” and “Bananafishbones.” Yet here is “Lost World,” the Cure’s first album in 16 years, without a pop single or any trading-in on its gloom-merchant reputation.
Smith has created an unrelentingly serious and sad work whose lyrics and arrangements stink of death, yet move as one – proactively, sensually — across eight long songs to create a universe unlike any this ensemble has attempted in the past.
If “Songs for a Lost World” doesn’t exactly move the needle on where atmospheric rock music should go in the 21st century, it certainly pushes all of the post-punk energy, fear and loathing that the Cure had at its start into something idiosyncratic and majestic.
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