I hope no one fell into a deep depression in the absence of a review – especially since you would’ve liked to have this album if you are into deep depression.
Disc 223 is...Bloodflowers
Artist: The CureYear of Release: 2000
What’s Up With The Cover? It’s a picture of Robert Smith. He looks grim and maybe a little angry, although he decidedly does not frighten. I don’t love this album cover, but it matches well with the record.
How I Came To Know It: I believe Sheila bought this album along with the 1989 album "Disintegration" at Lyle's Place maybe five or six years ago. They were both discounted (this one was $7.95 and the other was even less, if I recall). This was my first exposure to later Cure.
How It Stacks Up: We have three Cure albums, but none of them are particularly famous, and then we have a Greatest Hits package to cover all that early ground. Probably not the best approach, but I've never been motivated to delve into the Cure, even though I like them when I hear them.
Rating: 3 stars
Having mostly listened to The Cure's hits, I don't know how common it is for them to have very long moody songs, but "Bloodflowers" is entirely that experience.
Ordinarily, this sort of an opening for a review would be the harbinger of many a groan or sigh but this album pleasantly surprised me the first time I heard it, and it surprised me again on this listen.
Still present are all the elements that made the Cure famous in the 1980s. Robert Smith's haunting vocals, and a hollow reverb sound that hides beautiful pop melodies in a soft, but not-so-comfortable blanket of alienation.
Although I hated The Cure in highschool, it was a requirement of all Heavy Metal Meatheads at the time. I came to enjoy their sound in my early twenties where I heard their hits on a compilation album - but I'll talk more about that experience when I roll an earlier record.
This one is more about my third discovery of the Cure - in their 'we don't care how commercially viable our records are at this stage of our career.'
I've found sometimes this approach can create some truly self-indulgent crap but it can also free up an artist to expand on some already good ideas without the fear of failure hampering their creative juices.
In the case of "Bloodflowers" it is definitely the second. The music here stands up against anything from their more famous stuff in the 1980s, although the tracks are certainly longer - most well over five minutes and half of them over seven. This is fine with me, as many of the longer songs are the better ones, including "Watching Me Fall", which at 11:13 shows you can actually have an epic-length track where the topic is ulimately a simple mood piece. OK, not all that simple - I think it is about an old guy paying to watch people have sex in a Tokyo brothel - but a mood piece nonetheless about the helplessness we feel as death approaches.
Lyrically, my favourite is "Where The Birds Always Sing" which begins:
"The world is neither fair nor unfair
The idea is just a way for us to understand
But the world is neither fair nor unfair
So one survives - the others die
And you always want a reason why
But the world is neither just nor unjust."
I think it is a song about losing someone early - so opposite to the despair of aging captured in "Watch Me Fall" but just as tragic. I also like this song as it always reminds me of the line from Hamlet, "There is nothing good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." It is also a good reminder that we put our own spin on the events around us.
In this regard, Robert Smith could probably lighten up a little. He veers pretty far into maudlin and doesn't come out,. Despite this, he sings it with such believability that we forgive him. After all, if it he didn't go so deep into the emotional well, how could he draw us in there with him?
The album's most emotionally honest song is "39":
"So the fire is almost out and there's nothing left to burn
I've run right out of thoughts and I've run right out of words"
Something we writers live in constant fear of. As it happens, The Cure have released two albums since. I haven't heard them, but I hope they were as good as "Bloodflowers"; an album I truly enjoyed, and one that provided an unexpected back door for me into a more intimate acquaintance with a band I deliberately missed the first time around, and only had time for the hits on the second.
Best tracks: Out of This World, Watching Me Fall, Where the Birds Always Sing, Maybe Someday, 39
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