Bloodflowers

    <zaurg> YEAH MOTHERFUUCKER. i just killed a big bug that flew in here
    <zaurg> with a sock
    <^PMS> zaurg, you are a mighty hunter
    <zaurg> yes 

"This dream never ends," you said.
    "This feeling never goes,
    the time will never come to slip away."
    "This wave never breaks," you said.
    "The sun never sets again.
    These flowers will never fade."

I spent about ten hours this weekend trying to find the new Cure album in its entirety on Napster. Why? Hell if I know. It's not as if I wanted much to do with them after their last album, and especially after "Wrong Number". But I was curious, and "Maybe Someday" had whet my appetite. I kind of liked it. It sounded like a Cranberries song, but it was growing on me.

Now I know where I'm going to be at 11:59 on Monday night. Bloodflowers might be the best album The Cure have ever recorded.

I say that with no small amount of caution, since I consider Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration, and Wish all to rank fairly high on that mythical global list of great albums. Without copying the style of the album, Bloodflowers matches Disintegration in depth, honesty, and emotional impact. What's happened here is that The Cure have finally managed to incorporate the pained sentimentality of their sappier Wish and Kiss Me tracks with the anger and confusion communicated by the better songs on Disintegration. Bloodflowers is all rumbling basslines, twisty soaring guitars, emotive chord progressions and harmonics, against a background of untreated guitar strum and rawer drums than the band has ever used before. Robert Smith building on motifs throughout his songs as his vocal melodies change to fit the tone of the section, each verse expanding on the ideas of the last.

Consistency isn't always a good thing. Sameness worked on Seventeen Seconds, but made Pornography something of a torturous chore except to those unfortunate enough to share Smith's 1982 mindstate. That album may be a work of unparalleled genius, but it's as far from cathartic as music can get. By contrast, The Cure's best albums have often divided themselves up internally with songs like "Lovesong", "Primary", "Why Can't I Be You?", and "Wendytime". These tracks provided a rest, and gave the greater album a sense of structure.

Like Seventeen Seconds and Pornography, Bloodflowers refrains from this device, and achieves that magical consistency which marks a truly great album. Seventeen Seconds avoids oversaturation through subtlety; Pornography just doesn't care. It kicks you in the teeth and doesn't waste a second apologizing. Bloodflowers is a more sophisticated album than either of those, and perhaps moreso than any of their albums, because its consistency is modulated with what I can only describe as color shifts. While a single style is maintained throughout the album, the feel of it changes dramatically from one song to the next. Because the album is so carefully and passionately structured as a single work, it achieves that rare wonder of amounting to far more than the sum of its parts. A listener invested in the music might finish the album simultaneously devastated and uplifted.

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that I have been rabid to hear the new U2 material for some time now. Aside from my borderline worship of the band, a major factor in my excitement about their upcoming album and soundtrack work came about largely because of comments made by producer Brian Eno at the Belfast festival this last November, as reported in the NME. (Thanks @U2.)

    It's actually dead easy to make melancholy. It's easy to make energy, its easy to make cleverness, it's easy to make intrigue, it's easy to make glamour. But it's very very hard to make joy. To make music that really grips you and lifts you in some way. That's hard. So that's what we're trying to do in some way.

Not for a single moment have I doubted U2's ability to pull this off, especially given their past work with Eno and Daniel Lanois. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" confirms this, and I've been dying to get ahold of the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' The Million Dollar Hotel to hear the other songs they've recorded for that movie. But it's another thing entirely for The Cure, a band with a history of overwrought darkness and inexplicable mirth, out of nowhere after seven years of abject smugness, ugliness, and sarcasm, to emerge with an album as heartfelt and pretty as I had hoped U2 would accomplish. Never, I think, has such a harsh, dark album been so full of joy. Because of this, its beauty isn't restricted by pessimism or sarcasm, as Disintegration and Wish were.

This is not to say that Bloodflowers is a happy album. It's fairly tortured. It's really quite a rocky ride. But there's something about it that speaks to love and hope as The Cure have rarely done before. It should bring tears to the eyes of anyone possessing a soul. All apologies to U2, but I believe may well be the best album of 2000. We've probably no right to hope for another like it.