The Cure Creates an Unrelentingly Sad and Singular Universe on ‘Songs for a Lost World’: Album Review

If I told you 40 years ago, when the Cure was in the midst of its new-wave wonder moment, that the band would craft an inventively elegiac epic like “Songs for a Lost World” — a singular record worthy of face-soaking tears — you would have broken my teasing comb and melted down my Kohl eyeliner. Though the bleakly beloved Robert Smith was notorious for tensely flanged, existential rants such as “One Hundred Years” and the controversial “Killing an Arab,” they were also the sugar-sweet weirdos behind the cartoony likes of “Love Cats” and “Bananafishbones.”

Yet here is “Lost World,” the Cure’s first album in 16 years, without a pop single or any trading-in on its gloom-merchant reputation. Smith has created an unrelentingly serious and sad work whose lyrics and arrangements stink of death, yet move as one – proactively, sensually — across eight long songs to create a universe unlike any this ensemble has attempted in the past. If “Songs for a Lost World” doesn’t exactly move the needle on where atmospheric rock music should go in the 21st century, it certainly pushes all of the post-punk energy, fear and loathing that the Cure had at its start into something idiosyncratic and majestic.

The death of the Cure composer’s mother, father and brother during time away from the studio haunt “Lost World” in a fashion similar to Poe’s separation from his young dead wife, Virginia. Uniting Poe and Smith may seem like a typical gothic match-up, but listen to the long spiny intros and poignant lyrical laments of “Lost World,” and it’s really not a daft comparison. “Songs for a Lost World” is to Robert Smith what “Annabel Lee” was to Poe: a restlessly tactile, scarily poetic testament to quietus. It’s teeming with the winced emotions of loss, bold in its tangle of clanging melodic guitars and pastoral piano, rich with mellifluous melancholy and topped with Smith’s forever-pained caterwaul, pulled further into dismay.

From its start, “Lost World” pulls no punches. The doleful instrumental opening of “Alone” borrows from David Bowie’s funereal finale, “Blackstar,” before yielding to Smith’s expiry prose: “This is the end of every song that we sing, the fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears.” The auspicious beginning of “Alone” gives way to the piano-heavy balladry and needy pleas of “And Nothing Is Forever” (“promise you’ll be with me in the end”) and the tick-tocking “A Fragile Thing.”

Cure listeners have heard an obsessive Smith kvetch about how he “could die tonight of a broken heart” before. But during “A Fragile Thing,” his moans are more deeply felt and closer to the brink. “This loneliness has changed me… we have been too far apart.” Later in “Lost World,” Smith leans into how his obsession with loss and lousy choices (“an ignorance of history and consequence… his weary dance with age and resignation”) has steered his life’s course, for better or worse, during “All I Ever Am.”

While the initial three songs of “Lost World” are awash in open-faced piano and smoldering synth, courtesy of longtime Cure keyboardist Roger O’Donnell, “Warsong” and “Drone Nodrone” give way to the rackety guitars of Reeves Gabrels. Known first from Bowie’s four-way democracy Tin Machine, the guitarist has worked with Smith since 1997 — although “Lost World” is Gabrels’ first full Cure album — so there’s something both lived-in and newly amorous and clamorous about the fresh guitar sounds on these last two tracks. So impactful are Gabrels’ wildly psychedelic leads and metallic scribblings that Smith is pushed to lend “Warsong” and “Drone Nodrone” his punchiest, most full-throated vocals in years. Death may be more than mere subtext on “Lost World,” but Smith has never sounded more alive.

For all of the Cure’s intensity and Smith’s impassioned pleas to this point, little prepares you for the solitary beauty and complex emotion of “I Can Never Say Goodbye” and “Endsong.” Above the former song’s wind-like cymbal crashes, earworm piano figure and receding synth-swell, Smith’s words of woe pierce “I Can Never Say Goodbye” with knife-like precision and surprise as he sings “Something wicked this way comes from out the cruel and treacherous night… to steal away my brother’s life.” And though aging while still young has forever been a silly topic for Smith, the now-65 Cure curator has caught up to his epoch years during the 10-minute long “Endsong.”

Rather than reminisce, Smith remembers the “hopes and dreams” of a not-so-lost world — all he had and all that he set out to do — bittersweetly. “What became of that boy and the world he called his own… I’m outside in the dark wondering how I got so old. It’s all gone.”

For all of Smith’s tortured soul soliloquies and overall sense of grandeur, there’s not one ounce of fat on “Songs for a Lost World.” No word is overwrought, no phrase fraught with unearned feeling, no hand ioverplayed. As an overall achievement, “Lost World” is Smith’s most fully realized and most mature artistic statement.