The Cure “4:13 Dream”
In 1989, when I was a sophomore in high school, there was a guy a year older than me who pretty much only wore black jeans, black t-shirts and ox blood Doc Martens. In the winter he would add a black cardigan. Occasionally he wore eyeliner. Once or twice, he wore a skirt. His hair was teased and sprayed up a bit. He had Bauhaus and Tones on Tail pins on his messenger bag. His black Volkswagon Jetta had a bumper sticker for 92.7 WDRE, the Long Island radio station that played The Pixies and New Order. While I was pale, acned, one hundred and fifteen pounds and busy wishing I could be Richard Hell, this guy was quite literally embodying the son of Robert Smith and Christian Slater’s character from “Pump Up the Volume.”
Before Grunge, before Alternative and before Pavement, this guy was trading mixtapes with a half dozen girls and giving zero fucks about sports. To me, he appeared confident, fully formed and untouchable. He was the very real deal. Today that guy is almost fifty and I suspect he’s moved on from all the proto-Alt flair. Amazingly, Robert Smith is past sixty years old, somewhere in England, married, laboring over the album he promised a decade ago. It’s quite possible, even probable, that he is still wearing the same uniform and waving the same flag for doomed love and eternal dreams that my high school hero once saluted. In a life wherein even the pure at heart eventually move on, Robert Smith just doesn’t. He shows up, every four years, paunchier and more tired looking, but with the same smeared lipstick and eyeliner and the Edward Scissorhands hairdo that took our breath away almost forty years ago.
I always really liked The Cure. I perhaps admired them even more than liked them. But I also never went deep into their albums. In truth, I simply cherry-picked the singles and enough name-checked deep cuts to estimate their greatness. And I concluded that there was something both arrested and on the nose about their music. I’m not proud to admit it. But, no matter how great the song, I would think: “I get it, Robert. But can’t you just move on, already?” Some of this aversion is no doubt rooted in the shame and self-loathing of my very normal, awkward adolescence. Some of it is likely justified by the everpresent melodrama of The Cure’s music. There are countless reasons, few good and most narcissistic, that The Cure were never my thing. And yet, many years after I moved on, the searing influence of Robert Smith’s music is so profound as to make it impossible to imagine Radiohead, The Killers, Bright Eyes and much of 90s Indie and Alternative without them. For an artist and band whose brand is so singular, the impact of The Cure is both deep and unexpectedly broad.
It is more a fact than a cliche to state that most of The Cure’s lyrics are about dream states filled with sad, alienated lovers finding delirious joy in a moment both doomed and eternal. That quality can enrapture the young, sensitive and lonely and repel the middle-aged, steady and cynical. But what gets lost in the false binary is the music. Over the course of their first fifteen years, The Cure invented an elixir that was one part the jittery, Factory Records beats, two parts dark, untuned post-Punk guitars, one part Jimi Hendrix’s swirling feedback and three parts Beatles’ sunshine. On top of it was a singer who evoked a desperate, breathless romance unlike any singer before or since. Nick Drake ostensibly perfected the gorgeous but sad, depressed music for romantics a decade before Robert Smith. But Robert Smith was doing something else. He was owning and then inverting the depression of it all. He was saying that to be alienated and lonely is not specifically a sadness. To the contrary, in Cure songs there is a greatness -- an almost orgasmic revelation -- in the wounds and isolation. In that brokenness, Robert Smith found both his unique vernacular as well as a language profoundly understood by countless teens and twenty-somethings.
Emo music directly tapped the lyrical vein of The Cure. But so many Indie and Alternative bands, especially those balancing anthemic choruses with feedback squalls, also owe a great debt to The Cure. By the 1990s, people began to note that, when you added up all of those lonely kids from Gen X and Gen Y, the crowds could fill stadiums. By the 2000s, it became both nostalgic and de rigueur to cite The Cure as a criminally underrated and wholly influential band from recent decades. All the while, Robert Smith kept his uniform on and labored over each album. He never rushed. He never chased trends. It seemed clear that he wanted to continuously evolve but to never change. Although Cure albums only arrived every four years, they were feasts to behold. There were always tons of B-sides and non-album tracks. You had the sense that Smith was prodigious in his writing and recording and truly pored over each song and considered how to construct the very best album from heaps of materials. Like Morrissey, perhaps his closest comparable, you sensed that Robert Smith not only wanted each album to be an event, but that he genuinely wanted them to be masterpieces as well. Robert Smith was sometimes a Rock Star. But he was always an Artist.
1992 was the Spring of Alternative Rock. That year, The Cure released “Wish” and scored a massive hit with “Friday I’m in Love.” Slightly ahead of the moment, Robert Smith watched on in the mid-90s as legions of bands sported big guitars, sensitive lead singers, artful noise and crystalline tunes. All the while, The Cure just kept on with what they did. Every four years they would release an album to significant acclaim. The same stories would be written, full of lavish praise and predictable quips. To many people’s surprise, Robert Smith simply never changed. And it seemed like the four year cycle would go on forever. In 2008, the band released “4:13 Dream,” a thirteen song, nearly hour long album. It was rumored that Smith’s original intent was to release a double album but he could not piece together the thematic or sonic pieces to make it all fit. Nearly fifty at the time of the album’s release, it seemed certain that another album would follow soon thereafter. Four years at most. But here we are, in 2020, and “4:13 Dream” is the last we have heard from The Cure. Robert Smith is sixty-one years old now. He teases a new album nearly every time he makes a public appearance. And then -- nothing. So, if “4:13 Dream” serves as a temporary, or accidental, coda, it likely requires more consideration than it received in 2008. At the veritable nadir of the recorded music industry’s long history, the album failed to sell 100,000 copies in America. None of the four singles cracked the top forty of any radio chart. It was The Cure album that most of the world overlooked or took for granted. And while it is unlikely that it will be their last, it still bears asking, “what did we all miss?”
Given their relative consistency and their historic achievements, it can be hard to evaluate a Cure album objectively on merit. If you compare it against their previous highs, most of their later albums will suffer. On the other hand, if you listen to a song or album from The Cure in 2008 and ask, “how would I feel if this exact song were made by Conor Oberst or Thom Yorke,” the answer is resoundingly positive. In comparing The Cure against themselves, the bias is simply unfair. On the surface, there is nothing on “4:13 Dream” that conjures the magic of their greatest singles. Similarly, the evolution here is subtle. There is more guitar and noise and less keyboard. The songs swell and recede with a controlled, chaotic wall of distortion that can resemble Mogwai, Radiohead or, well, The Cure. Many of the songs are anthemic in tone and spirit while lacking the hook or chorus required to function as an anthem. Additionally, there is the issue of lyrical sameness that is both the band’s calling card as well as their most willful limitation. Nearly three quarters of the songs from “4:13 Dream” are explicitly about magic, tragic love. On “The Perfect Boy,” Smith offers lines so familiar and on brand that it seems certain that a reasonably smart “Cure algorithm” would have come up with the same. He squeals four lines that are so Cure-ish as to almost sound like plagiarism.
You and me are the world, she said
Nothing else is real
The two of us is all there is
The rest is just a dream
Compared to most of the album, “The Perfect Boy,” is pert and minimal, with just some plucked chords, bass and a little drums. At barely three minutes, it stands out and appeals to the significant part of me that prefers the band when they keep things very simple and play to their strength -- the singer, his guitar and some moody bass line. “Freakshow” scratches the same itch. Barely two minutes long, it is shot out of a cannon, Smith gets right into a little wah wah, some Joy Division hitch in the beat, and many more words than there are seconds in the song. He simply cannot contain himself or escape his brand as he sings:
And I am screaming
She spins the world round
I want to stop
Bittersweet again
Her opening move
Down and out in black
While much of the lyrical content on “4:13 Dream” is eminently familiar, most of the music, in contrast, is noisier and more shapeless than The Cure of the 1980s and 90s. “Underneath the Stars” manages to create wind and waves from Smith’s guitars, mixing his vocals way back into the storm. It is still a breathy paean to the infinity of love and to the intimacy of the moment. But the tune and the singer are submerged under a sea of noise that brings to mind Mogwai or even Slint. Elsewhere, the band tries hard charging, almost experimental noise with less success. By the middle of the album, on “The Real Snow White,” “The Hungry Ghost” and “Switch,” you begin to feel something like Grunge creep in. The guitars and bass feel like they are heavy to no discernible end. The drums, in particular, get weighed down. And even the singer, who can sound famously breathless, sounds more out of breath and tired than we have heard him before. Amid all of it, though, The Cure still find moments of tunefulness in doom and glory in alienation. F
For eleven songs, It’s still very much the same singer and the same band. Like all great artists, The Cure is striving. But they are not pandering and, even as Smith neared fifty, he appeared surprisingly comfortable in his youthful character and uniform. But then, almost stunningly, the band transforms for the final two songs on “4:13 Dream.” “The Scream” builds on a relatively simple, if hypnotic, guitar refrain into an almost middle eastern electronic din. Midway through, Smith lets out a primal howl that finds its way into a melody within the industrial clatter. It barely sounds like The Cure. And it may not be my cup of tea. But I would venture that it is still a very good cup of tea. From there, the band constructs an even heavier wall of noise on the closer, appropriately titled, “It’s Over.” When Smith howls this time, it’s not the romantic, exploding heart variety. This one is a catharsis of regret and frustration. It’s the “I can’t take this one fucking minute more” kind. It took him roughly thirty years to get there. To get out of the id and into the ego. To get out of the isolation of youth and to break through the frustration of middle-age. To wipe away the eye liner and the lipstick and to wash the shit out of his hair and just burn it all down. To change out of the black pants and shirt and Doc Martens. When the album ended, I found myself hopeful that perhaps the end of something great was the beginning of something new. It’s been twelve years since he screamed “It’s Over.” I must say, he sounded pretty believable.