In 2008, Robert Smith, cruising on autopilot, runs low on melodic fuel and sometimes appears to parody himself on tracks that lack a backbone or inspiration.
Despite the incisive Sleep When I’m Dead, this thirteenth album by The Cure resembles at best a batch of 1980s B-sides. One can’t help but wonder what energy still drives Robbie to release albums so meager, stiff with half-finished compositions, drifting, devoid of a spine or any flesh beyond scraps of a once-fiery youth that has vanished forever.
The opening long track, Underneath the Stars, with its tangled guitars and incantatory fever, gently hints at a horizon that unfortunately closes in on itself just as quickly, due to a lack of melodic fuel and, more critically, a drought of intensity.
A Bad Dream
Heard dozens of times already on previous albums—especially the weaker ones—the majority of the songs seem to claw themselves out of a weakly incandescent magma and cool just as quickly, like statues that have atrophied, stiffened, and become painful. And it’s not the ghosts of the Stooges (The Real Snow White) nor Hendrix (Switch), summoned to his bedside, that will turn this 4:13 Dream into anything other than a bad dream.
