The Cure never really got bad, conventional wisdom says, they just became too familiar. Sometime over the last decade they lost their ability to recreate the magic of hearing them for the first time. That may be true, but I couldn’t care less. Robert Smith still writes lovely little pop songs, and a great song is a great song, regardless of whether it sounds a little bit too much like something from Wish. Even when new Cure songs are a little safe, Robert Smith’s vocal are anything but.
On the latest Cure album, 4:13 Dream, he chirps with the enthusiasm and capriciousness of an ADD-riddled kid, layering vocal tick upon vocal tick, which is only fitting. Everything else about these songs sighs; Smith’s voice is just doing it the loudest. Even as he nears 50, he’s still recording music best heard while lying on a bed, staring posters on the ceiling.
Though it’s met with merely lukewarm reviews from been-there, done-that critics, 4:13 Dream is a hell of a Cure record, song-for-song as catchy as any they’ve recorded since Wish, if not Head On Door, and nearly as vital. On song after song, Smith sounds genuinely surprised by how sweeping these melodies are, and the choruses are more slippery than they initially appear. Simultaneously chipper and brooding, this is pop music as only The Cure can play it.
