The album Robert Smith called one of the best The Cure will ever make: “It would be fantastic”
In the early days, when Robert Smith‘s band went by the name Easy Cure, all they had was the premise for easy-fix music. Music that would later be labelled as “goth” was just a way to unveil the darker sides of the mind, basking in the beauty of wallowing when little else made sense. Of course, Easy Cure was seen as “a bit hippyish,” according to Smith, so they instead went by something far simpler.
Though they’re no doubt one of the best bands of the modern landscape, it feels we don’t really linger on the name as much or how it connects to the band’s broader legacy. At its simplest, the cure is a concept that could apply to any enjoyable music, a self-medicative therapy of sorts that can put a band-aid over life’s gashes and wounds easier than any other method.
“The Cure sounded much more it,” Smith once said, and though the change from “Easy” to “The” seemed nothing more than them following the trend most were at the time, the concept itself sort of differs depending on context and art form. Obviously, we know that the basic premise is something that fixes something else, be it a disease, psychological state, or more deeply embedded societal issue.
In Lewis Padgett’s 1946 novel The Cure, the concept revolved around a distinctive ambiguity, manifested in the unpredictability of the story itself: the whole time, you’re entirely unaware what sort of atmosphere it’s trying to evoke, just that there’s something strangely enticing and a little unsettling threaded throughout, before it’s revealed with more certainty near the end. It’s hard to ignore the similarities with The Cure’s music, and that you never really know what’s pulling you in other than an inexplicable yearn.
Because that’s the thing that’s constantly hard to put your finger on when it comes to The Cure, but it’s also the one thing that makes them far more authentic than most other bands: it’s not about the binaries of light, dark, happy, sad. It’s about the swirling abyss that exists in the middle, the one that makes you run on ambiguities, like touching running water when your brain hasn’t caught up to which temperature it is yet (and there’s that strange initial moment when you’re sure you can feel both hot and cold at the same time).
But while this vagueness gives The Cure a sort of edginess where there’s no beginning, middle, or end, Smith once felt differently about the whole thing. Music aside, he once thought Bloodflowers was the beginning of the end, because, put simply, he thought it was the peak of their abilities, and the perfect send-off for a project about finding the answers to everything when nothing else made sense. “I had every intention of Bloodflowers being the last Cure record,” he once said. Adding: “I thought it would be fantastic to finish with the best thing we’d ever done, but I wasn’t sure we could pull it off.”
Interestingly, Bloodflowers is to many Cure fans what Death Magnetic is to most Metallica fans—or Tranquility Base to Arctic Monkeys loyalists. In other words, it’s rarely the one anybody mentions when faced with questions about The Cure at their best, but it’s hard to suggest that this has anything to do with the music itself. Of course, it’s by no means Disintegration or Pornography, but the quintessential Smith tropes are still there, offering respite in a world where relief seems inherently sparse.
