Remember the last time (OBSELETE opinions in general)

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Product:	OBSELETE opinions in general
Date:	12/07/01 (3 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Their finest album, Astounding lyrics, Accomplished and mature

Disadvantages: none

The Cure had been pretty much dismissed as has-beens in the '90s, releasing countless compilations and live albums while they struggled to come up with a studio album. And when that studio album ('Wild Mood Swings') finally emerged it was, with the exception of a few tracks, a largely disappointing retread of past glories. That the next album,'Bloodflowers', should prove to be their finest in their 22 year career, was truly remarkable.

The cover of the CD is somewhat deceptive. Its crudely digitised illustrations conjure up images of Robert Smith playing with Photoshop after he's come back from the pub, and its dried-blood hues suggest the album is going to be a desperate bid to regain the crown of Gothdom (having failed to regain the crown of Quirky-pop with 'Wild Mood Swings'). But once the music is playing you realise that the band have left such labels far behind and created something truly special.

'Out of this World' sets the tone for the album. Intricate guitars and bass provide an multi-layered backdrop for a wistful longing for escapism. Like the rest of the album, it sounds so much like the Cure, yet somehow so fresh, contemporary and inspired that everything else in their career pales in comparison. The beauty of 'Disintegration', the lyrical maturity of 'Wish', and the intensity of 'Pornography' have all been distilled into an album of incredible emotional impact.

'Watching Me Fall' hits the listener with a ferocity not heard since the days of 'Pornography', an encounter with a Tokyo prostitute providing the inspiration. Compared to the subtle, coloured textures of the previous track, this is a song of harsh clarity.

"The room is small, the room is white
Her hair is black, the bed is white"

The music is fearsome, a towering 11 minute monster, Simon Gallup sounding as though he is physically disembowelling his gui
tar, its protests building up to a monumental scream, with Robert Smith howling in self-loathing until the dislocated, out-of-body climax:

"And in the blood red Tokyo bed I watch me coming round
She pulled him down for hours - deeper than I've ever been
And as I fall in the mirror on the wall, I'm watching me scream"

And as he falls, you find yourself following, sucked into this black hole of a song. Echoes here of the melodrama of 'Siamese Twins', but there is no denying the raw power of this song.

'Where the Birds Always Sing' is an abrupt change in mood. With its urgent, driving acoustic guitars and soaring keyboards, there's more than a tinge of the transcendental in its golden skies. Smiths lyrics here are astonishing, revealing what a mature songwriter he has become:

"You always want so much more than this,
An endless sense of soul and an eternity of love
A sweet mother down below and a just father above"

The wistful 'Maybe Someday' is the closest the band come to a pop song on the album, a solid guitar-led sing-along that has been remixed to good effect since the album's release. Its up their with their 'Just Like Heaven' and 'Inbetween Days', its delight diminished only by the company it keeps on this album.

'The Last Day of Summer' is archetypal Cure, with shimmering flanged guitars carrying Smith's lament:

"All that I have, all that I hold
All that is wrong.
All that I feel for, or trust in or love
All that is gone"

A profoundly sad song, it sounds like the song they spent an entire album trying to write on 'Disintegration', and one begins to wonder how they have managed to rise so magnificently from the ashes of inactivity and disappointment of the last decade or so.

'There Is No If' is like a whisper caught in the wind, a lover-to-love
r conversation with a remarkable, symmetrical lyric. It begins with

"Remember the first time I told you I loved you
It was raining hard and you never heard
You sneezed and I had to say it over..."

and ends with

"Remember the last time I told you I love you -
It was warm and safe in our perfect world -
You yawned and I had to say it over"

The music is as sparse and delicate as the words, the guitars being plucked like raindrops, and a keyboard somewhere in the distance sounding like a train slipping on its rails. Devastating in its simplicity and in its sentiment, this could be the greatest love song ever written, better even than John Cale's 'Close Watch'.

'The Loudest Sound' continues the theme. The song's gentle dance beat brings a welcome, beautiful breeze to the album, and there's a guitar solo that might actually be the song of a bird of paradise. Its gorgeous, its heartbreaking, and my life would be emptier without it.

The dance beats continue, albeit with a searing increase in pace, in the angry and bitter '39'. The drums come to the forefront, hissing and snarling, and Smith's lyrical tour-de-force is completely contradictory to his defeated

"I've run right out of thoughts, and I've run right out of words
I used to feed the fire, but the fire is almost out"

But this is nothing compared to the title track, to which this song blasts a path.

'Bloodflowers' sounds like it was unearthed from an era between 'Faith' and 'Pornography'. The only backward-looking song on the album, it is nevertheless one of their most accomplished songs to date. The drums clatter like spiders in a hollow, sepulchral space that seems to swell in size as Smith's desperation grows:

"Between you and me
Its hard to ever really know
Who to trust
How to think

What to believe"

At which point the guitars are thrown into a blazing furnace, and Smith lets slip the honest simplicity of his previous lyrics in favour of a final symbolic flourish:

"You give me flowers of love
I let fall flowers of blood"

With which he lets out an agonized, breathless gasp.

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