I wasn't planning on getting super-invested in the new Cure album, as I'd previously felt I'd amassed all the Cure records I'd ever need, and didn't really think they had any gas left in the tank after Disintegration (although I kept dutifully picking up their records and going to their shows up to and including Bloodflowers). While it's hard to encapsulate how seismically important their earlier albums were to me, I just felt I'd gone as far as I needed to go (I'd jumped ship on U2 and ... er... Metallica in much the same way). But then I heard "Alone" and was pretty much blown right off the porch.
As my learned comrade Ned Raggett wrote in his recent review for The Quietus, it's incredibly difficult to listen to the new album objectively without comparing it to previous efforts and eras, but damn if there isn't some real gold here. As Ned said -- THAT VOICE -- of Robert's is entirely undiminished by the passage of time, even when evocatively lamenting how his own advancing age has left him alone and adrift, as if the warm, safe glow of summer will absolutely never come back to him ... us ... or anyone ever again.
This closing track is a forlorn monster that doesn't at all feel like the ten minutes and twenty-three seconds it takes to engulf you in Robert's bottomless depth of melancholy.
One quibble: I realize he played with Bowie and a host of other notables (that's him all over Tin Machine), but Yank stringbender Reeves Gabrels' impressive guitar heroics still just don't seamlessly mesh here. When he starts shredding at 07:59, it certainly sounds cool, but it doesn't sound like The Cure.
A minor point.
Drown in it.
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