“Hello ChatGPT, my name is Robert Smith, could you please write me an album of Cure songs that sound vaguely like 1989’s Disintegration? But this time, infuse the lyrics with themes of time passing, growing old, raging against the dying of the light etc. It’s just that, these days, all the money is in getting middle-aged millennials to stream records from the artists they listened to when they were teenagers, to remind them of better times while they’re changing nappies or doing financial planning. Many thanks.”
This assessment is obviously unfair, because Songs of a Lost World is actually pretty good, competently made, solid. But there’s no question that it sounds like the Cure by numbers, and a very conscious, some might say cynical throwback to the dreampoppy, gothy, proggy sound of their best work (though not, of course, to the “idiot pop” of their most famous records, like “Friday I’m in Love” and “Boys Don’t Cry”). As I myself fall into the increasingly decrepit and cantankerous demographic the album is aimed at, I can’t help but appreciate the nostalgia. The songs are simultaneously fragile, twinkly, mournful like the Cocteau Twins, but also long, doomy, and muscular, like Type O Negative – an inimitable combination that only the Cure have ever really pulled off.
The album’s themes also strike a chord. Songs like “Alone”, “Nothing is Forever”, and “All I Ever Am” bemoan a “world grown old”, how there’s “nothing left of all I loved”, how Robert can’t stop raging against the dying of the light, lest death step in to fill the gap. “A Fragile Thing” and “I Can Never Say Goodbye” are plaintive relationship songs – the former about his wife, the latter about his late brother – while “Warsong” is a truly menacing and uncomfortably current meditation on the disturbed mentalities produced by, and which perpetuate, war.
So it’s a good album. At times, though, the songs feel a little interminable – I wasn’t a fan of the endless 4 minute instrumental introductions on Disintegration, let alone here, where the sound is flatter and less tuneful. And depending on your taste, the lyrics are either romantic, Byron-esque, deeply literary and poignant, or the work of an overgrown teenage boy in his bedroom writing bad poetry. More the former than the latter, or both at the same time, but it’s a fine line to walk at such a venerable age.
All things considered, though, Songs of a Lost World is a worthy sendoff. Let’s hope that’s what it is – personally, I am fearful, because all of that hairspray and black nail varnish won’t pay for itself.
Overall: * * *
Standout track: “Warsong”