Bloodflowers [Import]

CURE had died long, long ago, with "WISH" and the supporting live album, "SHOW", in 1993. "WISH" was their best, and one of the most brilliant albums created ever. Sadly however, a good chunk of the band left it, leaving Robert Smith all alone, and expropriating him of the best music-collaborators, he could ever work with. The magic of CURE wasn't the same at all, with the new recruits. With all the charm of the old CURE missing, CURE, post "WISH", just couldn't survive, and had to call it quits. "BLOODFLOWERS" is Robert Smith's the last attempt to resuscitate and bring life into a dying band.

When it comes to melancholy, no one could write them as good as CURE. "DISINTEGRATION" was a melancholic masterpiece, created when CURE was at its creative best. With "BLOODFLOWERS", it seems as if Robert Smith is crying out the tears that he had forgotten cry out in "DISINTEGRATION", and had kept them bottled up for a decade, to be released, when he needs help, the most. Alas, this time however, his words and music just don't seem to stir up the traditional CURE aura, and falter badly, groping for a deus ex machina to save his band, and the album from drowning.

Even with a band he is not comfortable with, Robert Smith, still manages to keep a flicker, if not the flame of the original CURE alive, in "BLOODFLOWERS". The opening track, "Out Of The World", much like "DISINTEGRATION's" "Plainsong", sad and somber, bids farewell, at the beginning of the album itself - A sort of a cheeky ploy by Robert Smith to dampen the spirits of the listener, at the beginning of the album itself. As the album progresses, each song, with almost the same mood as "Out Of The World", says goodbye, in its own lachrymose manner. Here is where a hint of the beauty of the old CURE gets alive and kicking. "Where The Birds Always Sing", "Last Day Of Summer" and "The Loudest Sound", each poignant, soulfully melodious and touching, show Robert Smith's helpless state of mind, and make the listener weep for this creative genius and his band in its dotage. "Watching Me Fall", "39" and "Bloodflowers" show that Robert Smith is incapacitated due to reasons best known to him, as these numbers drift aimlessly into nothingness from being real gems, never to regain composure, loosing ground, and making a fruitless attempts to prove worthy of something which the album could be proud of.

CURE is a band, which always seemed to understand, stand by, and provide a dependable shoulder to cry on, for its fans, in their times of pain. With "BLOODFLOWERS" however, the roles are reversed, and it is Robert Smith and CURE, who seek sympathy from their loyal fans, rather than they themselves providing some.

Remember faith?
It had a beautiful, morose arc ending with the absolute loss of faith in life for robert.

Remember pornography?
That album was composed in the deeps of his despair and contains some of his finest prose. It also completes the arc that ended in complete nadir on faith, raising this album above the status of mere whining: "I must fight this sickness, find a cure"

Remember disintegration?
It was an album full of the pain of parting and homesickness. Nowehere near as dark as previous works, but sad like watching someone grow old.

What does bloodflowers have to say? Bloodflowers states over and over: "I am Robert Smith, and I am tired of being Robert Smith." Unfortunately he's been telling us this since the 90s, and often with much more eloquence. Let's take a gander at some of the fine lyrics on bloodflowers, compared to earlier ventures.

Isolation and loneliness was always a nice theme for the cure.

Before:
"No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes
And no flags wave me home" (Faith, all cats are grey)

After!
"But the last day of summer
Never felt so cold"

Ouch. Summer is cold. Don't dig too deep there, Robert. How about an image of hopelessness and despair?

Before:
"Ambition in the back of a black car
In a high building there is so much to do
Going home time
A story on the radio" (pornography, 100 years)

After!
"Yeah the fire is almost out
And there's nothing left to burn"

Rusty isnt quite the word I'm looking for. Its as if all ability to make a unique image, or even to NOT MAKE A CLICHE has left robert smith's body. This is amateur poetry at best and is loved by the masses because it validates their equally bad writing.

Bloodflowers is full of other lyrical atrocities. Sadly in this small space I can't outline them all. Its trite music for a trite generation, and I'm sad that robert smith has, as he puts it so succinctly, "run right out of thoughts And [I've] run right out of words." To end the cure on this note is truly depressing. As evidenced in pornography and their other albums through the 80s, this band was never about teenage fatalism and giving in. Until now...