Say It With Bloodflowers

04/21/2000 2:00 AM, LAUNCH
Lyndsey Parker

Bloodflowers, the 12th studio album from seemingly immortal gloom gods the Cure, has been heralded as the dramatic closing chapter in a dark and dismal trilogy that began with the 1982 landmark Pornography (still arguably the Cure's most claustrophobically, self-indulgently cheerless effort) and resumed in 1989 with that masterpiece of mopery and misery, the instant and eternal classic Disintegration. And though the Cure's latest opus doesn't quite reach the bottomless black depths of utter dread and despair of the former or the grand orchestral heights of the latter, it certainly bears enough sonic similarities to both works to make this "trilogy" theory seem like more than just a convenient marketing gimmick. This is definitely not the Cure known for such (relatively) effervescent alt-pop radio ditties as "Love Cats," "Inbetween Days," "Why Can't I Be You?," and "Friday I'm In Love." A single overwhelming earful of Bloodflowers' centerpiece, "Watching Me Fall"--basically one continuous, agonized, 11-minute banshee wail that is distinctly reminiscent of Pornography's feral howl "One Hundred Years" and Disintegration's tormented title track--makes that startlingly clear. Suffice it to say that anyone masochistic enough to listen to all three albums consecutively should store all razorblades and sleeping pills safely out of reach.

However, Cure leader Robert Smith--a Goth-rock icon who for all purposes is the Cure, with his trademark troll-doll tresses and scarlet slash of a mouth, not to mention his unmistakably tortured vocals, which seem forever on the verge of shattering into strangulated, inconsolable sobs--prefers to think of Bloodflowers as an album unto itself, rather than just part of a larger whole. "Is Bloodflowers the third part of the trilogy that began with Pornography and continued with Disintegration? Not really," he muses politely. "Because with a trilogy, by the time you get to the third part, you have to be aware of the first two parts for the third part to make sense. And in this instance, you don't have to have any prior knowledge of Pornography and Disintegration to appreciate Bloodflowers." Still, he does concede that the three albums do serve as a sort of linear representation of the Cure. "Pornography and Disintegration were used in the studio by me to show the others what the Cure could achieve when it was really, really good. And I was hoping that Bloodflowers would join them on that elevated plateau. Having said that, the three records do work together back-to-back, as far as following a line of how I was to who I am. It's interesting for me to see what I've turned into!"

Throughout the Cure's 22-year career, Robert Smith has turned into many different characters and creatures, including the post-punk minimalist behind the Cure's 1978 lean, clean debut, Three Imaginary Boys ("my least favorite Cure album, because I had no control whatsoever about how it sounded," Robert grumbles); the puckishly playful imp behind the frothy Eurodisco of 1983's Japanese Whispers ("I wanted to confound what anyone thought of the Cure; it was kind of a cartoon record. I hated that period of the Cure and I don't look back on it with any fondness at all--it makes me kind of queasy..."); and the acid-addled loon waggling his fingers and psychobabbling about caterpillar girls and bananafishbones and pigs wearing groovy purple shirts on The Top ("a bit of a confused record," Robert says quite understatedly). Yet it is the midtempo melancholy of the trilogy discs, as well as the doomy dyad of Seventeen Seconds ("the album where I felt the Cure really started") and Faith, that has always been, and will forever be, held up as the sound of the Cure.

"The first interview I did around this new album was a U.K. interview--the opening salvo thrown at me was 'This sounds just like the Cure; it could have been made at any time in the past 10 years,'" says Robert as he reflects on the overall consistency of his music. "And though it was meant as an insult, I was like, 'Thanks! That's great!'" Yet Robert is just as quick to insist that he's "never really accepted deep down that there is a Cure sound," further explaining that the Cure's many stylistic shifts over the past two decades have culminated with Bloodflowers. "Going back to the trio in the early '80s, it had a very particular sound and for three albums; you knew it was us as soon as it started playing. There was another definitive Cure sound in the late '80s, around the time of Disintegration. It became very keyboard-driven; there were a lot of layers, washes, pads. It became very big and dramatic-sounding. The current lineup has developed another kind of Cure sound--which uses elements of both of those."

The Cure's experimentation with and exploration of so many sundry styles has allowed them to continually straddle that thin and precarious line between the underground and the mainstream for more than 20 years, making them one of the few bands in the unusual position of having top 40 singles (including "Love Song," which went all the way to No. 3), releasing not one but two greatest-hits compilations, and packing arenas as colossal as Dodger Stadium, yet still often remaining stubbornly and defiantly inaccessible. "Even though the general public know the Cure through the videos and the pop side, that's never been at the heart of what the Cure is," Robert stresses. "And the songs that mean the most to me on an emotional level are very rarely the ones that are singles or commercially successful. I think this is an albums band. We're not a singles band. "

One has to wonder if Robert has deliberately sabotaged the Cure's chances at fully, finally crossing over to the mainstream and becoming as huge as such obviously Cure-influenced alt-rock darlings as, say, Smashing Pumpkins. Why didn't he just go for it and crank out a few more "Love Song"s, "Friday I'm In Love"s, and "Let's Go To Bed"s? Robert simply shrugs, "After the Wish tour and album, which went No. 1 everywhere, we reached that stadium-rock level and we didn't capitalize on it, because it's not my nature. I did it once before. After the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me album, I got a first real taste of big-time success in America. My reaction was to make Disintegration, which was considered at the time to be commercial suicide; the fact that it actually elevated us up another rung on the ladder was very quickly forgotten. I remember the record execs listening to the initial mixes and tearing their hair out, saying, 'This won't work!'

"Most of me doesn't want that kind of success," Robert freely admits. "There was an element of the Wish tour that had a really bad effect on me. I was seduced by the lifestyle. And while I retained enough intelligence at the time to see what was happening to me, I figured if I carried on like that I would quickly lose any semblance of humanity that I still had left. I've spent much more of my career in the Cure not being successful than being successful. And I think I've had enough of a taste of success to know that it's not as great as people think it is."

This lack of commercial ambition is, ironically, probably the real key to the Cure's extraordinary longevity. "I don't think the Cure has ever considered itself to be a fashionable band," Robert states with some pride. "I'm attracted to people who have sense of style versus fashion; I would like the Cure to be a stylish band versus a fashionable band. I'd like the Cure to be considered a very unfashionable band in many ways. There have been times where other people have decided that we fit into their notion of what's hip and happening, but that's one of the weird things about the group: we have a big, wide, general audience and then a small, rabid, hardcore audience, and the two very rarely meet. It's kind of weird. We're a bit of a psychotic group."

Though it's the big, wide, general audience that has catapulted the Cure into the Billboard charts and filled all those arenas to capacity, it's the small, rabid, hardcore audience that's really kept the band afloat. Such fierce fanbase loyalty no doubt has much to do with Robert's bleak, anguished lyrics (delivered in an equally bleak, anguished voice), which, like the words of Robert's pessimistic peer Morrissey, have struck a particularly resonant chord in the black hearts of countless forlorn fans, who seem to find precious solace and catharsis in Robert's sorrowful laments. But Robert's lyrics aren't entirely autobiographical, he divulges: "I try to shy away from being too specific in songs, because I want more people to empathize with the whole thing." He insists that he isn't quite the suicidal sad-sack he's painted out to be. "People think they know who I am because they've read the lyrics--but there's only a small part of me that goes into the songs. The bigger part of me that's content a lot of the time and very happy with my life doesn't write songs about it. That part of me has no urge to create."

Speaking of having no urge to create...since the release of Bloodflowers, speculation has run rampant that it will be the Cure's final album. Of course, this isn't the first time that such rumors--rumors often substantiated by Robert himself--have circulated. As far back as Pornography, it seemed the demise of the Cure loomed large. "It marked the end of that period of the Cure," Robert says of that early epic of ennui. "It's a rites-of-passage type of album. It's the first time I've done something that had a huge effect on me in every respect--emotionally, physically, spiritually. It almost killed me." Robert first seriously threatened to end it all over 10 years ago, with Disintegration, which he describes as "my rebellion against everything I thought I wanted, which was like the big success. I became 30 and invested a lot of negative values into what it was to be a 30-year-old. It certainly was one of the best three Cure albums, because at that point I thought it was all over." Robert once again cried wolf regarding a Cure breakup in 1992, when the Cure released Wish. "After Wish, I walked away from it all and the band effectively broke up," he recalls. But the band with apparently more lives than the most tenacious love cat rebounded yet again in 1996, with Wild Mood Swings, which for Robert was like "starting all over again; I felt, 'I just want to do it again.' It was like a rebirth."

So the Cure have never really given up or given in, though their output has slowed considerably over the last decade. "We've made four albums in the last 10 years, and we made eight albums in the 10 years before that," Robert points out. "And there are reasons for me slowing down in what I write, but I don't think it's to do with the longevity of the group itself, but with me turning into a different person who feels less of a desire to be heard."

So, is it really true this time--will the Cure soon not be heard at all? Is Bloodflowers really the Cure's swan song? Robert's answer is typically vague. "When we were making Bloodflowers, it was intended to be the last Cure album," he begins. "I always said that when I turned 40, I wanted to stop and do something else. It's very rare for a group to finish with their best work--to finish on top. And I just would like to do that. I would like the Cure to be remembered that even at the end, what we did was good. Bloodflowers is designed to be the end of it all, and I think it is good enough to be the end of it all. It's nudged out the Wish album to get into the top three Cure albums."

However, even though Robert may forebodingly warble, "I used to feed the fire, but the fire is almost out," on the new album's bittersweetly titled "39," evidently some of the embers of his creativity still burn bright. Ironically, it was the very experience of recording the Cure's "final" album that ignited that old artistic flame anew. "The thing is, making the album--the actual process of doing it and what we've ended up with, which is something the whole band really believes in--has rekindled my enthusiasm for the whole project," Robert chuckles wryly. "So it's somewhat paradoxical. Because before we made the record, I was pretty disillusioned about the band and my role in it. And I felt we had probably come to the end of the natural life of the band and I wanted to go out with a bang. Having made it and realizing we can make really good music when we put our minds to it, it's made me want to make another one!"

And so, perhaps it is another line from Bloodflowers, the title track's "These flowers will never die," that more accurately predicts the future of the Cure.