The Cure

Who would have guessed that Robert Smith’s song catalogue would be the wondrous well in which today’s critical darlings (Interpol, The Stills, The Rapture) are ecstatically drowning themselves. The Cure’s new self-titled album is an approximately 40-minute tour of the many moods and sounds that have made the band’s 20-year-plus career unique and enduring. There are the dreary sonic dirges (“Lost,” “Anniversary”) for those depressed, aging Goths contemplating suicide by midnight candlelight. Psychedelic exploration rears its English head (“Labyrinth”, “The Promise”), guitars shaking, stitching impressionist patterns of Eastern images and sound. It is Smith’s romantic, plaintive pop songs, however, that prove him the genius. “Before Three” and the album’s single, “The End of the World,” hint at the same elegant, chill-inducing goosebumps of Smith’s “Just Like Heaven”—the perfect song—full of wistful lyricism and impossible emotional heights.