anatomy · of · distance

The new Cure album appears to have shown up at JB, complete with a DVD. It appears that they're now signed to Geffen. It doesn't actually say what's on the DVD.

I used to be a huge Cure fan, but I found all their post-Disintegration output, with the exception of a B-side or two, disappointing. It seems that, over the past decade or so, The Cure have perfected the art of making what they believe people want a Cure album to sound like, and stuck rigidly to it, leaving no room for the sort of innovation and play that their earlier albums had. This process culminated in Bloodflowers, which I bought only to find it a waste of perfectly good polycarbonate; all the songs on this album sound like turgid, self-indulgent stadium-rock dirges, and each is about a minute or three too long. My copy ended up in the second-hand racks of Heartland or Collectors' Corner a year or so ago.

As you can see, I'm not keen to plonk down my $24 and buy the new album (the fact that their label put them in a studio with a mook rap-metal producer doesn't inspire much additional hope either). On the other hand, I'd like to give them another chance, rather than writing them off entirely. After all, New Order produced a lot of boring, forgettable output, from their respective solo side-project albums to Get Ready, and, just as one was about to throw in the towel, came out with Here To Stay. (Granted, it took the Chemical Brothers to find their old groove and give it back to them, but it worked.) And that's not mentioning Morrissey, who's in fine form to this day.

So, has anybody here heard the new Cure album? What's it like?