Cure's final painkiller

Band leaves the music scene with

By CLAIRE LUNA
Editor in Chief

It's always the glory and grandness of the last of anything that starts the cries for its return. Like the Main Street Electrical Parade, one hopes that the Cure will soon announce it was joking that Bloodflowers would be its last release.

Evoking ghosts of yesterday, Bloodflowers represents the best of what the Cure has been in the last three decades. Completing a trilogy started with Pornography in 1982 and continued with Disintegration in 1989, the album includes melodies and phrasings lifted directly from those works.

However, Bloodflowers is not just a formulaic rehash of the Cure's best creations in a slightly altered form. The album provides a hopeful resolution for the angst that many of the band's early fans felt when they first started donning dresses and black eyeliner. Eighteen years after the release of Pornography, the Cure shows on its last album that it has not remained stagnant, as it incorporates electronic beats into its trademark hypnotic sound, nor does the new release cheapen any of the group's prior work or make it any less relevant.

The "trilogy" label may make some think that listening to the other two albums is mandatory for listening to the new one; while this is not the case, a few spins of Pornography and Disintegration will enhance the listener's understanding of the new record. Also, reviewing where the Cure has been makes this marked step forward that much more powerful and meaningful.

A kind of history lesson for those unversed in the Cure's earlier work, band frontman Robert Smith has described Bloodflowers as "the perfect Cure album." While demonstrating the vitality and relevance of the group's entire body of work, the album is never encumbered with a false sense of nostalgia. Showing listeners where the band has been makes where it is now that much more striking. It also increases the poignancy that a band which has returned to the critics' good graces following 1996's eccentric Wild Mood Swings is now leaving a musical landscape that needs it so much.

No longer utilizing the characteristic obscurity of cockatoos and imaginary men that marked some of the band's earlier work, the nine long, cathartic songs on Bloodflowers manage to be candid without being obvious or trite. Lyricist and musician Smith, a 40-year-old married man and icon of romantic despair, no longer has the need to express himself through vague references; instead, he incorporates metaphors that require a great deal of thought - albeit careful, rational postulation rather than any sort of skewed mental processes.

Opening with "Out of This World," Bloodflowers doesn't start on the best note; the song moves at a snail's pace and lacks the passion the band displays so soundly on the other tracks. The only song that detracts from the rest of the album's cohesive, atmospheric presence, "Out of This World" drags along like a mocking ghost of other filler tracks the group has used.

However, the marathon 11-minute "Watching Me Fall" picks listeners up again and doesn't let them go, nor would any listener want to get off the ride. The other songs manage to be stunning both individually and together, like a team of finely organized players that all have their own unique special skills. An example is "39," a tune that with its aching drumbeats and frenzied guitar recalls the restrained wildness of earlier Cure tunes such as "High" or "Open," though with more of a Middle Eastern flavor.

Resisting labels such as "the Cure sound" or "depressing Goth music," the album demonstrates a straightforward pragmatism in songs such as "Where the Birds Always Sing": The world is neither fair nor unfair / The idea is just a way for us to understandŠIt's just us trying to feel that there's some sense in it.
The realistic nature of most of the songs is enhanced through the reverb-drenched music, which swirls a full guitar sound and dark keyboards together into a languid ambiance of melody. Swinging from hard guitar coupled with Smith's passionate moans to jingly keyboard with a counterpart of sweeping guitar, the shimmering melodies replete with minor chords are stronger in a strict musical sense than on other Cure albums - a difficult feat, as most Cure fans would attest.

With no easy entry point for the album, such as Disintegration's "Pictures of You," Bloodflowers may not be as accessible to new fans as other albums were. "Maybe Someday" is the closest thing to a single that this record has, and even that is a departure from popular "Friday I'm in Love"-type tunes.

The band's trademark long introductions set the album's pace in the first 30 seconds of each track for what will either be a stark visit to the past or a vision of a different, and most likely better, future. Always finding the perfect foil or complement to the lyrics, Bloodflowers carries listeners on a gorgeous magical carpet ride of sorts that leaves them ready to change the world - or at least their lives.

Rather than dwelling on the past, the band says, using it to move forward is key - a fitting sentiment for an album that is the last for such a storied group. Almost every song reflects this, including Bloodflowers' first U.S. single, "Maybe Someday": No I won't do it againŠIf it can't be like before I've got to let it end / I don't want what I was / I've had a change of head.

Though the band may have lost its fire, as Smith claims on "39," one hopes that the success of Bloodflowers and its companion Dream tour will rekindle the flames. At the same time, there is no more fitting end for a group that has influenced some of today's greatest musical groups - as well as inspiring untold numbers of individuals who think of the group's 13 albums as commiserating, contemplative friends that reflect three generations of despair, love and - finally - hope.

Copyright 2000 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 139, No. 28 (Wednesday, February 23, 2000), beginning on page 9 and ending on page 11.