Powerful, moving and dark, on grief, loss and the passing of time, this milestone release by the British cult band of Robert Smith is their first LP of new songs for 16 years, but is worth the wait with its emotional depth and strength. Smith is something of national treasure - regularly playing epic three-hour shows of the Cure’s full canon to maximise fans’ value for their bucks, as well reducing ticket and T-shirt costs and attacking greedy ticket agents’ pricing and fees. Amid the darkness, he is an artist of integrity and decency. Across the eight tracks over 49 minutes the album is never unhurried, Smith not singing until well into the fourth minute of opener Alone: “This is the end of every song we sing…”, but throughout, it feels perfectly weighted rather than baggy. There’s no shortage of doom and gloom and heartfelt emotions, with the loss of loved ones and youth as primary subject matter, such as the orchestra-infused love song And Nothing Is Forever, and the universal epic 10-minute Endsong as a primary examples (“It’s all gone, it’s all gone, it’s all gone, left alone with nothing, at the end of every song”) filled with those classic heavy clattering drums, bass and distinctive thrumming guitar sound. I Can Never Say Goodbye, embellished with piano and a build of distorted guitars, is a particularly moving performance, as it is very directly about the loss of Smith beloved brother Richard. The sensitive, profound, dark and downbeat is The Cure’s forte, but there is one pacier, sharper number, Drone:Nodrone, about the arrival of a drone above Smith’s garden. You can imagine what he thought about that. The real deal then, still going uncompromisingly and candidly strong on a brilliant release. Out on Lost Music/ Polydor/ Universal.
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