The Cure – 4:13 Dream

After much backtracking and many delays, 4:13 Dream finally sees the light of day as, er, the 13th Album from Crawley’s finest glitter sprinkled doom mongers. Having said originally been touted by Robert Smith as a double album, the 4:13 Dream that was actually delivered clocks in at just under an hour and has, surprise surprise, 13 tracks. Did I mention they released a single on the 13th of each month for 4 months in the run up to the albums release? 13. That’s 13 people. 13. Got it? Good.The good news is that much of what is on display here ranks up there with The Cure’s very finest work. Single ‘The Only One’ jangles away and Smith yearns as keenly as he ever has done. Lyrically and musically it sits somewhere between ‘Inbetween Days’ and ‘Pictures of You’. This is not he only time the back catalog gets revisited, literally on ‘Sleep When I’m Dead’, which was originally written for the ‘Head on the Door’ album. Opener ‘Underneath The Stars’ acts as a gateway into that familiar lovelorn dreamlike realm in which so much of The Cure’s agony and ecstasy takes place. Over 6 minutes of epic drums, a hazy fug of guitars and effects and plentiful twinkles before Smith’s vocal appears, beautifully out of phase and cloaked in effects, uttering his never ending story of falling into doomed, escapist love all over again: ‘Alight for 13 billion years/ The view is beautiful/ and ours alone tonight/ underneath the stars’. This escapism continues on ‘The Perfect Boy’ as Smith declares ‘The two of us is all there is/ the rest is all a dream.’ It seems The Cure have rediscovered there way with a pop hook- the chiming euphoric chorus of ‘The Real Snow White’ is once again an indication of their talents. All the hallmarks of a classic Cure record are here, the phased arpeggios and the big choruses free flowing and dreamlike. Only once do they really come unstuck, and they do it royally. ‘Freakshow’, released as one of the singles, suddenly gets ‘Funky’ with wah wah solos, near spoken word lyrics and electro claps. Perhaps an ill-advised dart at the charts, this comes off as a poor version of the Ting Ting’s ‘That’s not my name’. Yes, it really is THAT bad. Luckily ‘Sirensong’ which follows is in the ‘classic Cure ’ mould, and the anomaly is soon forgotten.The question 4:13 Dream poses is where do The Cure belong? Robert Smith and Co more or less wrote the book for half of the globe straddling bands at the moment. Their sound has been stolen by the likes of Black Kids and The Killers and they in turn have sold it on to millions. But ‘pop music’ is now, more than ever, a young mans game, and it sees unlikely that those who went out to buy ‘Partie Traumatic’ will be rushing to discover The Cure’s latest. A quick look at the chart positions for those precursor singles seems to bear this out-’The Only One’ peaked at 48 and only hung around for 2 weeks, while ‘Freakshow’ could only reach 89. It is a shame that 4:13 Dream looks unlikely to do anything more than please long term Cure fans, as their is plenty here for a new audience in search of pop hooks and articulate moping to enjoy. 76%