REVIEW: The Cure, Bloodflowers (Fiction)
- Don Share
"When we look back at it all, as I know we will," Robert Smith sings on the first song of his latest album, "we always have to say goodbye." Twenty years and twenty Cure albums may have culminated with Bloodflowers, rumored (as has nearly every album for the last decade) to be the band's last gasp. Intended as the final disc in a trilogy which began with 1982's Pornography and continued with 1989's Disintegration, Bloodflowers has finality literally written all over it.
No wild mood swings here... it's all down; fortunately, down is up for Smith, whose writing - diverse in other atmospheres - is effably sad and indelibly wise when he plays in a minor key. The production is full, dense, and atmospheric, and the songs don't rush themselves, but take their own bittersweet time. "I've been watching me fall for it seems like years," he sings accurately. And what singing: Smith's voice flies high over the chasm, echoing and quavering, even when the lyrics direly insist that "if it can't be like before I've got to let it end."
While endings are the theme, Smith is subtle enough to let in tiny but illuminating rays of possibility: "the world is neither fair nor unfair," he sings in "Where the Birds Always Sing" -- fair enough. "Maybe Someday" even (ambiguously) allows that "maybe someday is when it all stops -- or maybe someday always comes again." "There Is No If" -- one of Smith's best ever -- admits that "there is no if -- just and," and "and" just may be enough.
Recognizing that "just enough" is all that life allows is what each moment of the album gets at. "The Loudest Sound" is the evil twin of the Beatles' "Things We Said Today," because its lovers "in silence.. pass away the day." But they have more than silence; they have each other.
Yet "39" is about how when one's "fire's almost cold," then "there's nothing left to burn," and the epic title track, "Bloodflowers," is the eerie, grim culmination of everything The Cure have ever done: "never die, these flowers will never die" slowly grows into its lyrical counterpart, "always die, these flowers will always die." The song is Smith's epic, and ends with our hero's pricking himself audibly, letting flowers of blood fall.
When it's all said and done, I can't quite believe that we've heard the last from Smith, though there's always that risk; after all, epics live in the retelling, and while flowers fade and die, there are always more flowers to come.
