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One of the band's most affecting works.
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90This is classic Cure music, straight up (or should that be straight down?): lengthy songs (most more than five minutes) with plenty of cold, alternately chiming and grinding guitars, fluttering keyboards and, of course, Smith's mournful yowl, which hasn't sounded this intense since the The Top's "Shake Dog Shake" in 1984.
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90This is classic Cure. Three listens and you'll love it.
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80Bloodflowers' stands as a glorious, if contradcitory, body of work. It won't win new converts but lapsed Cure fans will find it a thrilling and rewarding hour.
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80Bloodflowers is a marvel. It has something to say, and it delivers that message with passion.
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Their disparaging wails and hums are strangely magnetic?
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The album does seem to pick up where Disintegration left off, offering long, casually cathartic songs driven by minor chords and loopy, languid drones.
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Fans who have waited patiently for a proper follow-up to 1989's acclaimed Disintegration should be pleased, if not necessarily bowled over by Bloodflowers, a deeply felt album with a similarly downcast mood.
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70On strictly musical terms, Bloodflowers is a disappointment. There is no daring journey to find that elusive new sound.
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Gone are the ill-advised brass and bare-faced chart aspirations of 1996's awful 'Wild Mood Swings', as are the flippant pop songs that commercialised The Cure in the mid-1980s. What we are left with is the dark, dense core of Smith's psyche, and a reminder that The Cure are at their fearsome best when creating soundscapes awash with uncertainty and dread.
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70Even as they approach epic length, the songs remain beautiful, dramatic, and above all else simple.
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70Bloodflowers smartly pulls up the weeds and cleans a bed for mid-life flowers akin to Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man or Dylan's Time Out of Mind, though it doesn't reach the creative heights of those albums.
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Bloodflowers boasts all of the Cure's signatures: stately tempos, languid melodies, spacious arrangements, cavernous echoes, morose lyrics, keening vocals, long running times. If you want something transcendent, you're out of luck, since the album falls short of the mark, largely because it sounds too self-conscious.
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60Wisely, Bloodflowers is every crotchet a Cure album. True, there's no blatant hit single - one of those sudden shifts into gloriously barmy pop frenzy - but there's still ample compensation to be had...
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Smith is incapable of writing five bad songs in a row; even hopeless records (1992's Wish) sport some saving grace ("Friday I'm in Love"). But he can write four bad songs in a row, and Cure albums tend to leak filler like an attic spilling insulation. The latest, Bloodflowers, is half dismissible droning, an unforgivable ratio considering it's only nine tracks long.
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Cure fans will enjoy this record, it's well-made and Smith doesn't break character. Everybody else, no sequels to "The Love Cats" will be found herein. Feel free to stay the hell away.
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30Smith focuses on his own artistic/existential questions to the exclusion of all else, including the record's production, which is completely monotonous, and its pace, which falls somewhere between a plod and a trudge. [#46, p.47]
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30Many of the songs begin promisingly, with glowing guitar figures and plaintive synthesizer cascades, but these hints of beauty get lost in a morass of feedback and ill-defined arrangements.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 19 out of 22
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Mixed: 1 out of 22
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Negative: 2 out of 22
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[Anonymous]3