Unlike much of the Cure’s output between the mid-1990s and 2008, Songs of a Lost World is textured and well-balanced, achieving a cinematic wall of sound worthy of comparison to 1989’s Disintegration. Just shy of 50 minutes, it’s also the band’s first studio album in 16 years that isn’t excessively long—a welcome change for a group that, while it excelled at taught minimalism early in its career, has tended toward rock excess ever since.
Songs of a Lost World, much of which was originally recorded back in 2019, finds the Cure not only avoiding past mistakes, but also the pitfalls that can befall releases with such a protracted development. The album doesn’t feel overworked, and largely sounds like a band playing live in a room. You wouldn’t know to listen to it that some of the music initially accompanied different lyrics or that Simon Gallup re-recorded his bass parts in the wake of the band’s recent tour.
The Cure’s rhythm section, key to the success of the atmospheric dirges on which they built their reputation, was lifelessly compressed and mixed low on 2004’s The Cure and 2008’s 4:13 Dream. Here, though, Jason Cooper thwacks away at his snare and toms while Gallup interjects fuzz pedal bass stabs for more than three minutes at the start of the epic opener “Alone,” eking out every last vestige of tension in Robert Smith’s composition.
Meanwhile, Reeves Gabrels, whose screeching guitar solos have become a cherished centerpiece of the band’s live shows for the last 10 years, weaves his instrument skillfully around the rhythm section, Smith’s plaintive vocals, and Roger O’Donnell’s layered keyboards. “Endsong,” the album’s 10-minute closer, provides Gabrels with a vast canvas to set the stage for Smith’s rage and despair: “I’m outside in the dark, staring at the blood red moon.”
Less sprawling but equally thrilling is the off-kilter “Drone:Nodrone,” which Smith included, along with tracks like “All I Ever Am,” to provide some variety and respite from the grief-stricken epics that bookend Songs of a Lost World. “Drone:Nodrone” is the best of them, with its freewheeling structure and hectic soundscape of wah-drenched guitar and rinky-dink keyboards. Elsewhere, “Warsong” broods impressively, with callbacks to various Disintegration-era songs, but—at just over four minutes, the shortest song on the album—is too brief to do justice to its lofty subject matter about man’s inhumanity.
Songs of a Lost World often feels like a playlist of tracks culled from a bigger collection of recordings—indeed, the album was reportedly whittled down from 25 songs to just eight—but it’s ultimately about the right length and just varied enough to avoid monotony. And despite its minor deviations from all the doom and gloom, Songs of a Lost World is exactly what it was intended it to be: a somber, at times beautiful, reflection on love and loss.
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