The clown is crushed

Some groups have their destiny written from the very beginning. At one time, we got to know The Cure as an extremely likable band from the second generation new wave on the debut album Three Imaginary Boys (1979), and then as a key proto-gothic the composition of the trilogy Seventeen Seconds (1980) Faith (1981) and pornography (1982). Along the way, inventing the Darker stylization (black clothes, make-up, tousled hair), frontman and main author Robert Smith (b. 1959) pop culture starting a whole genre. He did it to hide from the materialistic world that was winning everywhere at that time (Thatcher's Great Britain, Reagan in the US, cheap electro--pop on the charts), and saved at least a bit of idealistic romanticism for some future times.

That same inexhaustible romantic impulse drove him to finally take over the full creative leadership of The Cure in 1985 and write all the songs on the landmark album Head on the Door - it was to establish them as mainstream pop-rock a group with artistic ambitions. Worn by brilliant singles Inbetween Days i Close to me, this collection of guitar wonders wasn't just a market success - it launched emotionality as something that's still in fashion, and since then everyone has come to love Robert Smith as the soulful rock 'n' roll icon of this cynical age. The group became what we can call "the secret big English band" - never on the front pages of the tabloids, but with a huge number of fans who always have a very, very special place in their hearts.

Three further releases – a double LP Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987), a masterpiece Disintegration (1989) and the most commercially successful Wish (1992) - cemented The Cure's market position to the point where they could do whatever they wanted. At that time, we put a good photo of Robert Smith on the front page of "Rhythm" magazine and sold everything we printed... That's why it's not surprising that their two-and-a-half-hour concert at the opening of Exit 2019 was not only one of the most successful productions of that festival, but also one of the most successful foreign rock tours with us of all time.

That The Cure are among the greatest living English bands was confirmed on paper, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.

AROUND THE WORLD

They confirmed their unwavering romanticism once again the other day, when they announced Songs of a Lost World (Fiction), the first record in sixteen years: it is an epic elegy in eight acts, which wraps up The Cure's career with grandiosely arranged, baroquely sumptuous songs about the inexorable approach of the end.

The album was once again solely written by Robert Smith, and it's clear why, after forty years, he once again dared to take matters into his own hands: once again the decisive moment had arrived. The last project 4:13 dreams it came out back in 2008, and since then we've had a series of brutal breakdowns - the world economic crisis, the pandemic, serious wars in Europe and the Middle East... recently his brother also passed away. The band, on the other hand, toured more than ever, finally enjoying contact with a worldwide audience, which grew exponentially thanks to the wide range of Internet services, and the enthusiasm for this unique group and its fairy-tale themes began to be shared by those born after 2000. .

It is likely that the notoriously slow Robert himself - spurred on by his encounters with people around the planet - finally decided to write a set of tracks that would map this troubled world from the inside. This signer was convinced of how eager he is to learn these things, when, in his capacity as the artistic director of Exit's main stage in 2019, he was invited to his dressing room, where he experienced the famous artist addressing him with the question: "You don't have to tell me about the history of Exit, I read all about it on Wikipedia - tell me, please, how did an ordinary, little man really live here in the nineties? I don't trust the media".

NO RETURN TICKET

That's why nothing Songs of a Lost World it's not ordinary, nor "just another song", and everything sounds like it's lived. Smith is no longer a lovable clown who sings to children as they dream about what life is like in their bedrooms. He is no longer a makeup-wearing poet who pours tender verses from his sleeve to impress fragile maidens. Terrible things are happening all around us, and for the first time he seems to want to tell us that we have nowhere to hide. The clown is crushed.

His self-disclosure begins immediately in the first three things: Alone, And Nothing Is Forever i A Fragile Thing. As David Bowie told us in his autobiographical hit A (1980) addresses himself by explaining how lonely and vulnerable he is as he slowly disappears - this is exactly the effect of confronting Robert Smith, who evokes all the shades of his increasing loneliness. It is shocking that the author has taken off his well-known mask and does not try to shake us for a single moment, but only presents the facts about his own loneliness and vulnerability and the feeling that he is slowly disappearing... and doesn't even recognize himself anymore.

Seriousness grips us even more when the melancholic tone of the album changes drastically somewhere in the middle Drone:Nodrone, whose bitter visceralness and loudness remind us that The Cure are first and foremost a rock band, capable of confrontation when needed. It represents a reckoning with someone else, a furious collision with a disturbing exterior. But it's only a moment. A delicate piano theme further offers a counterbalance through reckoning with oneself I Can Never Say Goodbye, dedicated to his deceased brother, and probably to other recently departed family members – a silent collision with a disturbing interior, which resonates even more strongly after the noise.

Under the orchestration of a rock band, whose momentum from composition to composition reaches symphonic proportions to The Beatles, on Songs of a Lost World rivers of drums often flow. Drums that introduce us to the ten-minute finale End song they are clear that they couldn't be clearer, as they suggest a marching step in their hint of unrelenting violence, while Robert sings about how it's all over, describing in very direct terms the end of his entire life experience, from childhood to the present day, in a rock ballad whose epic does not leaves room for doubt that it is an epic for each of us individually. It is a song that describes the end of life - because we no longer recognize this world as our own.

It can be an old man's dilemma, but it can also be a precise description of the dilemma of every thinking individual faced with the dizzying unrecognizability of the modern world, which takes us like a slide, sliding down, into something completely unknown.

Robert Smith announced in recent interviews that this album is the first part of a trilogy he has been writing for years and that he will release two more in a fast pace. On the cover of this one there is a monumental stone sculpture Bagatelle of the famous Slovenian and Yugoslav sculptor Janez Pirnat (Smith is the sponsor of the annual event dedicated to him on the island of Brač, where he died in 2021), which seems to be spinning in space, in free fall. Robert's attachment to these spaces and the way in which the forces of fate can be seen here, after this knowledge, is undeniable.

A better conscious-farewell album hasn't been recorded since Blackstar, again, David Bowie.

The Cure remained themselves until the end.