Music
The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World is their first album of new work for 16 years – and it’s one of their best. By John Kinsella.
The Cure laments for a broken time on Songs of a Lost World
The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World is their first album of new material in 16 years. The title suggests nostalgia and lament and, while there’s plenty of lament, the nostalgia is bleak, even grief-stricken. This is a rich and complex engagement with loss: here sentimentality is phased into nothingness.
When the first song on the album, “Alone”, was released as a single late last year, discussion swirled around the influence of Ernest Dowson’s poem “Dregs” – not a great poem of the English poetry canon but a grim one with proto-goth sensibilities in overdrive. It’s not hard to understand why singer-songwriter Robert Smith ran – or walked very slowly – with it.
“Alone” is marked by a long instrumental prelude before the voice tolls in. That extended theme-setting really grabs me. Smith himself – who wrote all the songs on this album – has said that the music is of paramount importance. The interplay of strings, drums and synth creates holes and then smooths them over, triggers doubt and eases our tension all at once. Though he started playing with the band in 2012, this is guitarist Reeves Gabrels’ first album of original material with them. This record also reminds me that though Smith wrote the songs, bassist Simon Gallup underpins their sound.
As an experiment, I read the Dowson poem over the top of this prelude and thought, yes, this is the goth signature par excellence. In the Dowson poem we read “The fire is out” and we slide towards “And health and hope have gone the way of love / Into the drear oblivion of lost things. / Ghosts go along with us until the end.” As Smith’s lilting, plaintive voice chimes in after the instrumental prelude, it extends and develops Dowson’s theme: “This is the end of every song that we sing / The fire burned out to ash, and the stars grown dim with tears / Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been / We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness.”
This is more than immense sadness and regret: it’s a consolidating presence after loss, after grief. It is a beautifully composed piece of lachrymose chamber music. Smith’s boy-girl love theme is as much about innocence as it is about loss, and there’s a delicacy behind its obsession with death.
“And Nothing is Forever” is lush, emotionally dense and slightly overwhelming. It’s the song that tends closest to a cloying sensibility, as personal grief and the intimacy of loss consume the instrumentation. It’s not a mix I like with favoured vocals then instrumental mood-substitution – it almost consumes itself with its diminished textures. “A Fragile Thing” has a bold if emotionally suppressed opening with nice drum moves to shift the sense of time. This is what The Cure do so well, exemplified by their early masterpiece “A Forest”: they create a mood that both tumbles ahead and sinks, lifts and falls at once.
The opening of “Warsong” takes some beating. It’s deeply affecting: burying itself inside the body, haunting and explosive, full of angst and critique, with sublime post-punk guitar work. Smith’s voice drags us over the wreckage of personal battles and, by extension, broader conflict. It’s a brilliant work whose mood extends the possibilities of goth and makes it as effective as it has ever been.
“Drone:Nodrone” opens with foreboding... the climb and fall of the beat, the interplay of that Cure weave of synth and guitars. It’s not surprising that drones are weapons of choice in a violent, dissociated world: “Staring down the barrel of the same warm gun.” The song has a feel of earlier Cure, but the sawing, jarring guitar breaks shock us into an immediate present.
“I Can Never Say Goodbye”, about the death of Smith’s brother, was first played in concert in 2022, its keyboard opening leading us into slashes of guitar and a beat of loss. “When you’re younger, you romanticise [death], even without knowing it,” Smith told NME. “Then it starts happening to your immediate family and friends and suddenly it’s a different thing.” This elegy is more than a dirge because it also reconciles the artifice of goth with the actuality of loss. The keyboard holds us and the weight of the loss. There’s grief as idea, and grief as paralysing reality.
“Endsong” is another instrumentally weighted piece full of exquisite repetitions and a mesmeric motif of recollection. The opening words don’t come till after the six-minute mark: “And I’m outside n the dark / Staring at the blood red moon.” This beautifully textured symphonic poem is immense and embodying – for me, some of the most interesting guitar work in its genre since John McGeoch’s performance on Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Spellbound”. Songs of a Lost World is my favourite album from The Cure since Seventeen Seconds (1980), with the most engrossing guitar playing since that album’s “A Forest” and “In Your House”.
The recent album Mixes of a Lost World showcases 24 remixes by various artists of Songs of a Lost World, with royalties donated to the charity War Child UK. It says a lot about the intent of Songs of a Lost World, which in its short time out in the world has become an enduring classic that reflects the agony of the world under stress.
For me, the original album mix was a masterpiece in the main, other than “And Nothing is Forever”, which fell a little short. So let’s start with how others dealt with this song. The Danny Briottet & Rico Conning’s remix is demi-dance-orientated at the start but becomes more bittersweet than the original. It’s okay but lacks impetus.
Cosmodelica Electrick Eden’s version is a subtle-lite repetition with shimmering Smith vocal fade repeats that glitter with irony. It shifts emphasis and creates a mesmeric inward-lookingness. Meanwhile, Trentemøller’s reworking of the song plunges us straight into the drawn-out moody voice, with echoes falling into keyboard glitter. The juxtaposition almost works, then gathers pace with a fuller confrontation with the voice. It’s a messy work but also the one with the most interesting analysis of the original. I admire its risk-taking.
As an escape from goth electronica whiteness, I leap to one of my favourite songs of the original album, “Warsong”, and the Chino Moreno (of the Deftones, alt-nu-metal-shoegaze) remix. It’s flatter, more doom-laden and somehow makes something almost hardcore out of Smith’s vocals. The lyrics do their own work. It has its own power.
Shanti Celeste’s “Alone” is a beautiful remix that shows how juxtaposition of mood intensifies on all levels: it’s dance with a choreography of aloneness and community. Something of the glorious instrumentation of the original is lost, but much is gained across the project as a whole. It’s all about sharing the moods.
The final song of the remix album is fittingly a fine Mogwai remix of “Endsong” that respects the long build. Mogwai’s overall mood requires patience and accrual. It’s a good fit and somehow Smith’s vocals seem to gain even more gravitas. It’s a serious project fringed with play: Stockhausen and Cage don’t seem that far away.
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