Review: THE CURE – “Songs of a Lost World” (Track by Track)

“Songs of a Lost World” is a touchingly melancholic record. Every time I listen to it it makes me shiver, cry!

It's an album that, with its powerful intensity and dark beauty, revels in a decadent aesthetic, enveloping those who listen to it in a cold but comforting embrace.

“Songs of a Lost World” it is, even before being a record made of songs, an event.
The last time they left us was in 2004, with “4:13 Dream”.
A fact now acquired that represents an immense time – sixteen years – especially in the recording world, and not to be underestimated. This album celebrates a rebirth and, above all, gives us back beauty: the beauty of new songs by one of the best bands in the history of music, which has always managed, with its narrative, to enter the emotional meanders of desolation and sadness, describing the impulses of the soul and pain in an empathetic way.

The main themes of the album are those of sixty-year-olds dealing with the passage of time, with life's losses, regret, love and a deep reflection on life and death, all linked by a strong emotional connection.

The Cure are masters in dealing with the intricacies of human solitude and desolation; and here, once again, they guide us in reflecting on the losses and regrets that dot life, in a fascinating meditation on love, time and the ultimate meaning of existence. They are universal themes, of course, but told from the perspective of those who have lived long enough to understand the fleeting value of every moment, every bond, every wound.

This album is essential, reduced to the bare bones, a distillation of eight tracks that know no compromises and remain far from commercial logic. Each song is a small fragment of darkness, a piece of truth that, however bitter, brings us back to our truest essence. It is the tension of the Cure, pure and disarming, that has made the strings of time vibrate since the days of “Disintegration” and which here seems to find new life.

In an accelerated, doped world, increasingly blind to authentic beauty and trapped in the illusion of immediate happiness, “Songs of a Lost World” it is a rare gift. It is a reminder of our fragility, a masterpiece of decadence and a hymn to the melancholy that, ultimately, makes us human.

Thank you, Cure, for yet another journey into the dark side of beauty.

I have no words to describe the beauty… Infinite, intact, intact, damned melancholy, Cure!!!

I spend a lot of time wandering outside at night, looking up at the sky, usually with a fire flickering somewhere nearby… as the flames die down, the stars go out and the dawn begins to break, there is always a moment where I can't help but feel an overwhelming sense of being very lost, very alone, very close to the end… that feeling is what I'm trying to capture in Alone.

Once I wrote this song, I knew the Songs Of A Lost World album would happen.

AND NOTHING IS FOREVER

And Nothing Is Forever was inspired by a promise I made to a loved one, that I would be with them when they died.
It's about acceptance of mortality and the terrible fear we have of dying alone.

A FRAGILE THING

A fragile thing is driven by the difficulties we face in choosing between mutually exclusive needs and in dealing with the futile regret that can follow these choices, no matter how sure we are that we have made the right choices… it can often be very difficult to be the person you are meant to be Truly.

WARSONG

The original version of Warsong was about someone I argued with, made up with, argued with, made up with, over and over again over the years…
I realized that what we were doing was a bit like what too many people seem to do, often on a much grander and more violent scale.
Every year another war… it is very difficult to understand why so many of us are driven to fight and fight and fight, unless it is the case that this is simply who we are as human beings?

DRONE: NODRONE

I was hanging around outside the back of my house and a camera drone flew over… it disturbed me, it really pissed me off actually.
It was a horrific reminder of the intrusive, surveilled nature of the “modern world.”
Drone:nodrone was inspired by the strange difficulty I had in accepting not only the event itself, but also my reaction to the event… and the even stranger difficulty I had in accepting reality in general… it's also about how difficult it is for me to give up chaos!

I CAN NEVER SAY GOODBYE

I Can Never Say Goodbye is about the unexpected death of my older brother Richard.
I wrote the music the day after his death, but I struggled for a long time to find the right words… In the end I decided on a simple lyrical narration of what happened on the last evening I was with him.
It was a very difficult song to sing on the Shows Of A Lost World tour, but it was always great.
Performing it on stage helped me deal with my grief.
I miss him.

ALL I EVER AM

All I Ever Am is about how difficult it is for me to “be” in the present moment, informed by questions about how “I” remains “me” in time… I know in my head that I am the sum of a multitude of other, younger versions of me, but there are times when I just can't believe it, I just can't accept it!
It's a strange feeling of dissociation, a feeling that something is wrong… and it's a feedback loop, because I'm the sum of my memories, but at the same time, my memories themselves are being changed by who I am now… I've always found persistence of “being in time” a fascinating topic… or not?!!

ENDSONG

2019, the year I turned 60 and The Cure recorded this new music, marked the 50th anniversary of Man on the moon. I was outside a lot that summer, looking up and back, lamenting the passage of time and growing old in an increasingly broken world.

Endsong closes the Songs Of A Lost World album with the opening song Alone in Every Way; the themes are very similar, intertwined, the songs almost echo each other… I feel much the same when I stand outside looking at the moon as I did when I was ten, but I know that the world beneath my feet is no longer the same same as before, and I know I'm not either.

This knowledge gnaws at me, and is made much worse by the unchanging moon's face. Left alone with nothing