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One of the band's most affecting works.
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This is classic Cure. Three listens and you'll love it.
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This 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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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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Bloodflowers is a marvel. It has something to say, and it delivers that message with passion.
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Bloodflowers' 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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Their disparaging wails and hums are strangely magnetic?
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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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Bloodflowers 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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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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Checkout.comOn strictly musical terms, Bloodflowers is a disappointment. There is no daring journey to find that elusive new sound.
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Even as they approach epic length, the songs remain beautiful, dramatic, and above all else simple.
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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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Wisely, 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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PunctureSmith 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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Many 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.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 47 out of 54
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Mixed: 4 out of 54
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Negative: 3 out of 54
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May 10, 2011
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Dec 21, 2011
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AliceXJan 8, 2006