“I don’t want you anywhere near me/Get your fucking world out of my head.” (‘Us And Them’). The words may read like angsty adolescent poetry, but when they’re screamed and bellowed in the unmistakable whine of a forty-something goth, these lines take on a far more sinister dimension. Time, it seems, has not mellowed Cure mainman Robert Smith one iota. If anything, this eponymous album, the band’s first since 1999’s Bloodflowers, is the angriest they’ve ever been.
Like The Pixies reunion, I feared for the reformation of The Cure (which basically translates as the rebirth of Robert Smith, seeing as The Cure really is just the spidery-haired one with a backing band). I was terrified that any new material wouldn’t stand up against classic albums like Faith, Pornography or Disintegration, frightened that the now middle-aged Smith would have lost the perennial outsider edge that gave him such a unique viewpoint. I needn’t have worried. Just as Charles, Kim, Joey and David were so much better than I could have dreamed, The Cure is more explosive, more impressive and more essential than we could have wished for and is much, much more than an exercise in nostalgia.
Behind the layers of white face-paint, the litres of lipstick and gallons of hair product, Smith is an idealist who’s “hanging for the ugliness to change/Waiting for a world too true” (‘Truth, Goodness And Beauty’). Trouble is, he’s not happy with what he sees and feels around him.
Smith is still searching for a place where he’s comfortable in the world but he’s finding it increasingly difficult to locate. The album opens with the words “I can’t find myself” (‘Lost’) repeated mantra-like, with our hero beautifully describing himself as singing “in the lost voice of a stranger in love”. He later admits, “It’s a big, bright beautiful world/ Just the other side of the door/ Six billion beautiful faces/ But I saw them all before” (‘alt.end’).
Some of Smith’s compositions still have the same dreamy wistfulness we fell in love with as teenagers. The bittersweet reminiscence of ‘Before Three’ is all whimsical lyricism about seas of gold, summer suns, silver sand and being “so fucked and high”, while the hypnotic ‘Anniversary’ could have come straight from Disintegration and the poppy, insistent ‘Taking Off’ harks back to their early-80s albums.
Just as often, though, these are songs of anger and alienation, conflict and rancour. ‘The End Of The World’s poppy, upbeat melody belies the darker subject matter underneath, where the black underbelly of a relationship turning sour is revealed for all to see, with enough heart-breaking observations for an entire novel. The bitterness of ‘Never’, meanwhile, is borne out of the hard won knowledge that when it comes to matters of the heart, you cannot squash square pegs into round holes, no matter how hard you try.
The aforementioned ‘Us Or Them’, the album’s centrepiece and standout track, is the white heat of pure rage: and is the first time the band really get to stamp their imprint on this incarnation of The Cure. Jason Cooper slams the drums like he’s trying to break them open, Perry Bamonte’s guitar slashes raw, red wounds across the song’s canvas, Simon Gallup pummels his bass guitar into submission and Roger O’Donnell’s keyboards scorch swathes of searing sound effects into the mix.
Despite his best intentions, however, it seems that Smith still believes in his fellow human beings and in finding redemption through love, as the two songs that close the album attest to, the almost upbeat ‘The Promise’ and the quasi-hopeful ‘Going Nowhere’. Wrongly dismissed in some quarters as a one-trick pony, whose stock in trade is misery and woe, Robert Smith is one of the most unique and astute songwriters Britain has produced in decades, whose glorious turn of phrase is often ignored. Image is nothing. Class is everything. First Morrisey, then The Pixies, and now The Cure are back and firing on all cylinders. See you down the front at Oxegen.