Bloodflowers

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

Amazon.com

No one revels in the sumptuous pleasures of melancholy like Robert Smith, the Cure’s leading mopemeister. In Smith’s world, it is always raining, comfort and happiness are fleeting, love is epic and torturous. On Bloodflowers, the band’s 11th studio album, his lyrical prowess continues to astound. Considering the subject matter, Smith’s always managed to steer clear of the clichéd, bad-high-school-poetry trap, and on Bloodflowers, the imagery is some of his most vivid and stabbing. On “The Loudest Sound,” a story about a couple who are, of course, growing apart, he sings of their tension: “She dreams him as a boy / And he loves her as a girl / And side by side in the silence without a single word / It’s the loudest sound I ever heard.” The music grows out of the same dichromatic marriage of love’s eternal hope and heartbreak’s inevitable bleakness. Layers of the Cure’s signature ethereal, buoyant guitar licks are paced at the momentum of a lava lamp, while melodies lurk only in an understated synth or distorted guitar. None of the songs scream “radio hit” like Wish’s “Friday I’m in Love” anomaly; and although Bloodflowers is less abstract, comparisons to Disintegration are easily drawn. If this really threatens to be the last Cure album—no, really, the real end—it’s a vision of loneliness and loveliness, a low note rarely surpassed in beauty and breadth. —Beth Massa

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Commerce being commerce, bands rarely have the luxury of writing their own epitaphs—after all, posthumous compilations can be tweezed from careers one-twentieth as long or as influential as the Cure’s. But according to Robert Smith, the moving, strangely dignified Bloodflowers is, in every sense that matters, the Cure’s full stop; a concept album about not making albums any more. And if you’re the sort who never believes au revoir hype, one listen should put paid to your scepticism, and two should prove it’s a keeper on musical grounds alone. Two years in the making, this companion to Pornography and Disintegration begins with the words “we’ll look back at it all…wide-eyed” and ends with the title track’s Socratic dialogue between mutability and constancy; faith and loss. In between, there’s a subdued tone but no weariness in its shape-shifting beats (“The Loudest Sound”), statements of intent (“Maybe Someday” insisting “Don’t want what I did”), a true-hearted, sweetly ridiculous love song (“There Is No If”) and a fearless eye-to-eye with age (the “How Soon Is Now”-ish “39”). And, everywhere, those yearning, depthless, ravishing flanged guitars. Simply put, it’s that rarest of things: a goodbye that’s deliberate, thoughtful, fond and gentle, and yet as tough-minded as most pop is wilfully craven. —Jennifer Nine