If life really begins at 40, then pity Robert Smith, a man who has spent more than 20 years ruminating on the sheer hopelessness of existence. One suspects Smith is rather annoyed that he didn't die sometime around 1982, sealing his immortality with The Cure's psychotic masterpiece of an album Pornography as a fitting epitaph. Yet not only did he survive he became hugely successful, a multi-millionaire icon for the terminally cheesed-off, so universally recognisable that he's appeared in South Park. No wonder that Smith should choose this mid-life landmark to reassert his serious artistic credentials with a new record called Bloodflowers, billed as the final part of a trilogy that began with Pornography and continued with 1989's Disintegration, generally regarded as the last great Cure album.
In other words, it's bleak, epic and conspicuously lacking in silly fluff about being a cat. Good portents, then, for this low-key comeback show. Smith's adroit pop sensibilities made him rich, but The Cure's essence always resided amid the comfort of sadness. So here we have a set dwelling exclusively on the dark side. Naturally, this is happy news for all concerned, not least the smiling Smith who looks engaged and committed, a credible presence despite ever more resembling a goth Marlon Brando. The new songs don't wield the consumptive power of yore - Smith would probably be dead if they did - but at least they sound authentic, riven with the same existential certainties that define the band's best work.
So when matters get really serious with a seething, utterly merciless One Hundred Years, it doesn't feel like an aberration. Amid this howling maelstrom, contemporary glumsters like Placebo are revealed to be mere pygmies of pain. It's followed by a swollen Bloodflowers and an encore of A Forest, effectively the first goth song, and there feels something quite noble about a man so unrepentantly immovable in his obsessions.
How much longer Robert Smith ought to sustain his adolescent world view is uncertain. As usual, he has claimed that this will be the last Cure album, but whether he really means it or not at least this would be an honourable valediction. He's the last of the dinosaurs, and as such, something of a national treasure.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
