I can sympathize with Robert Smith. By all accounts, the process of making a record grows more grueling and frustrating with every passing year-- leave alone the headaches of making one under a name as closely watched as the Cure's. There are administrative hassles, label dealings, producers and directions to decide on, and the personalities and egos of an entire band to manage. These things can be draining-- they can eclipse the love of making music that gets people to start bands in the first place. And most people, by the time they hit Smith's age, have reached a level of perspective and maturity where they're not about to bash their heads against walls over anything that's not really, really important; they're more interested in doing the work that makes them happy and comfortable.
This seems to be the position Smith has come to. He's described the band's last recording stint as "the most intense and difficult three months that I have spent with other people who I thought I knew"-- three months that produced "the most fraught album I've ever been involved in." (Both claims that, considering the rest of this band's biography, are really saying something.) He's changed his methods accordingly. For 4:13 Dream, the group has been reassembled as a four-piece, and optimized for a comfortable live-band feel-- filled with people Smith can happily ram through his songs with. He's also joined up with producer Keith Uddin, who's taken a no-frills "live" approach to the band's sound. Smith-- and the band's press agents-- say this has been invigorating, that the Cure has stripped back to an unfussy rock band in a studio, bringing out all the happy creativity that might have been hemmed in by all those headaches and difficulties. Certain buzzwords keep popping up around it all: rawness, energy, spontaneity.
And across the length of the six-minute opener, "Underneath the Stars", it's tempting to believe the hype. Uddin gives the band an immense, spacious sound-stage, with dense trails of reverb shooting out behind guitars and vocals, and the group fills it happily, sounding unclenched, loose, energetic, and elegant. The same goes double for the closer, "It's Over", which has the Cure sounding as convincingly frenzied as it has since parts of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.
A few songs in, though, I can't help but notice a problem with this. Two songs appear in a row, "Freakshow" and "Sirensong". The former is the sort of track the Cure would once have turned into something creepy or yowling, somewhere between "Lullaby" and "Hot Hot Hot!!!"; the latter's a gliding romance, something like "A Letter to Elise" or "One More Time". And yet the free-wheeling, unstudious approach of this album leaves them sounding curiously similar, more or less abandoning one of the things that's made the Cure so legendary: This is a band that has always been fantastic with atmosphere, able to make single tracks stand alone as incredible aesthetic experiences of their own. This is a band that has thrived on mood and detail! But listening to 4:13 Dream feels like something else-- it's like listening to a rangy, carefree live recording of songs that exist in much more specific forms on a record somewhere back at home. You stand in Uddin's arena enjoying that show, but the songs that pour out aren't reflecting off the crisp album tracks you loved before you arrived-- in some cases, they're reflecting off modes from the band's back catalog, prompting you to fill in details based on where you know the band might once have taken this music.
Before you object, let me assert that this isn't just a problem for people overly beholden to the Cure's past; there are times when it seems to be infecting the songwriting itself, which can feel as loose and blurry as the performances. Obligatory bursts of dark drama aside, this is one of the band's happier records, and it hits its peaks two-thirds of the way through, with a string of lilting pop songs. But for a "pop" record, a lot of tracks here seem poorly framed, even half-baked, as if Smith's "spontaneous" approach-- his attempts to capture the raw energy of his demos-- have kept him from putting as much attention into the organization of his songs, the flow of the parts, the clarity of the melodies, the ludicity of the lyrics, or even the firmness of the ideas behind them. Which is really something, given that Smith wrote two albums' worth of songs for this record: Is it possible he's reinvigorated his creativity by letting himself be a bit slapdash, by not focusing long enough on any one of those tracks?
The great saving grace, of course, is the one critics are duty-bound to mention-- the fact that even a slightly doughy Cure record, one that doesn't entirely play to the group's former strengths, still only descends to the level of a fairly good album. (If the Cure were debuting today with this record, they'd be celebrated for Smith's voice, still incredible, alone.) There are memorable songs here, from the gorgeous refrains of "The Hungry Ghost" to the dizzily happy "This. Here and Now. With You"; there are times when they break out the wah pedals and whip up storms with an infectious happiness. The only problem is that the rambling approach that let Smith get these things out has kept the results from being all they might have been.
