For one moment in time, I was the single most goth person on the whole planet. On Halloween last year, I watched the sun rise alone from a burnt down mansion along the coastline while blasting the music of bands like Nine Inch Nails, Type O Negative and of course The Cure. For every other moment since The Cure’s debut way back in 1979, Robert Smith has been the single most goth person on earth and has well worn and maintained that status. The Cure’s been a band I’ve long been interested in and through rather peculiar circumstances, but the band has also been one to leave a massive legacy with a massive span between any new material as well. Compared to the bands that took longer than Tool, The Cure has now gone nearly 15 full years since a new album despite remaining a consistent and commendable touring band, securing their place toward the top of bands to go the longest between new album releases while still remaining functional. And like a band like Metallica, let’s face it, The Cure’s legacy is in their touring and classic catalog. They don’t slouch on that front either, their sets last 2 and a half hours at least even into their 60’s and cover their entire discography, who else is playing a 30 song setlist with several 8 minute long songs in it? Not Tool, I’ll tell you that.
In a chance of freak nature, showing up to Blossom this time around was a disaster at first. For the past month before, we had nearly no rain, and so the moment we showed up it began pouring. Thus ensued a nightmare of panicking attendees when the venue evacuated the lawn due to the passing thunderstorms. Idiotic venue employees thought yelling website urls would calm the crowd, it was quite a hilarious disaster to witness but I greatly benefited from the hard reset of lines that clearing caused. We stayed by the entry gates and wound up amongst the first back in when the weather cleared shortly after. By “Prayers for rain”, that isn’t what we were asking for. The rain came down hard, and it’s how I felt inside in a very good way awaiting as my boots filled with water and the crowd stood quiet in the rain. Finally after the thunderstorm cleared, The Cure was set to take the stage. We hit the secret back area merch booth for no line again and quickly staked a spot in the front and center of the lawn to stand not so quietly in the rain.
The Cure opened with what is a now regularly performed new song from the allegedly upcoming “new album”, the one being talked about since six months after the release of the disappointing 4:13 Dream all the way back in 2008. This new song “Alone” sounds better than the entirety of 4:13 Dream and pretty much any 2000’s era The Cure was. This song is straight up Disintegration/Wish era feel bad wallowing in the best way possible. It works as an opening, they have done this every date of the new tour and have done this one back in their last tours before the 2020 pandemic. The Cure’s touring lineup these days consists of a lot of usual suspects from their wonder years. Simon Gallup, who infamously quit The Cure after 40 years only to rejoin in less than 40 days last year, is back and rocking the bass right where he belongs. His bass work is quite possibly my single favorite element of The Cure’s music, he is an all timer on the bass guitar in rock music, period. Roger O’Donnell from the Disintegration and Wish days has been back for a while, and David Bowie’s former guitar player Reeves Gabrels has been involved for over a decade now as well. An interesting new return is from Perry Bamonte on additional guitars and keyboards, he first joined the band for the Disintegration tour and first recorded on Wish, eventually he left in 2005 with this tour being his first return since. Jason has been drumming for nearly 30 years now, and Robert Smith needs no introduction. The band’s second song was the iconic “Pictures of You”, what more needs to be said about this song? They might open with a new song basically nobody here knew, but then it’s straight to the reason this band can still outsell stadiums and amphitheaters with a wildly acquired taste of a style and no new music for longer than even Tool. The Cure sound fantastic live in 2023, a band that formed in the late 1970’s. Another goth geezer, Danzig, is coming here in September and charging $80 a ticket, and he is not going to sound fantastic. The Cure’s concerts and live performances have garnered acclaim due to their incredible attention to sonic detail, they have 6 members in this iteration to perform things like “Pictures of You” to album recording level replication. They are not fucking around live.
After the astounding “Pictures Of You”, they went right into the Disintegration mega hit “Love Song”, the song that pushed them into worldwide mainstream stardom. It’s a great gloomy little depressing pop song that kept the crowd standing not so quietly in the rain. “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” is an all timer from The Cure in my opinion, a very dark and dissonant tune mainly based around a very long intro with scaling sitars and psychedelic delirium for days. This one was being swapped in and out of the set at random on this tour, so I was very much ecstatic to hear this. The funny story about these last two songs ties back into how I even got into The Cure way back when I was a young teen. Investigated inside job 311 covered “Love Song” in a very white boy reggae style for their greatest hits album that I actually bought a CD of back in 2003, and Deftones performed a cover of “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep” on an MTV tribute to The Cure special I actually watched live back upon it’s Halloween 2004 airing. See, sometimes MTV could actually come through with something cool, this special coming hot off the heels of The Cure’s 2004 Ross Robinson produced very much not nu-metal self-titled album. That album was okay, certainly better than 4:13 Dream but not as good as 2000’s Bloodflowers. Anyway, they promoted the album with this special which included bands of the day such as AFI, Blink 182 and Deftones covering the songs of The Cure. It was a time capsule of that 2004 nu-metal to emo mainstream rock transition, but a nice break from the usual airings of garbage MTV offered at the time. Sandwiched between the two was another new song called “And Nothing Is Forever”, this is yet another song that definitely draws from the longer, more droning and downright clinical depression inducing sounds of their heydays of misanthropy. I like these new songs, if they ever receive an album to come out on I’m sure people will be calling it a late career comeback. “Burn” from The Crow soundtrack was in the set, a live staple since release, and was the first song to ever feature drummer Jason Cooper who’s been there ever since. It’s definitely a jam, I like this one and wish they’d have gone more down this compared to whatever the fuck Wild Mood Swings ended up becoming. Up next came a very, very cool part of the set where they began heavily focusing on very old material from the early and mid 80’s.
“Kyoto Song” started this one out with it’s namesake Japanese strings and stylings. This was a cool song to see live, but they kept this The Head On The Door focus going for quite a moment here when they busted out “A Night Like This”, a very 80’s sounding song for sure. This thing has a saxophone solo, and they made sure they played that sax live too. Trent Reznor played a damn sax too here at Blossom last year. “Push”, another deep cut from The Head On The Door followed up that one. Man we are getting a ton of deep cuts off that album right now in this set and that is just fucking incredible. It also helps they go through with making sure all of the quirks that go along with strange instrumentation can be covered by this newly stocked 6 man lineup for The Cure.
Robert quickly announced between songs “We’ve been doing some Head On The Door, now we’re doing some Seventeen Seconds” before ripping into my single favorite pre-Pornography The Cure song, the droning, minimalistic gothic stalk of “At Night”. Now this was a song I was not really expecting but it is the sort of song I am floored to get to see. Love this one, the peak of early young The Cure. “Play For Today”, yup that’s some more Seventeen Seconds classic stuff. Even before I saw this stuff at the show, Seventeen Seconds was my favorite of their first three before Pornography. Now I do have to mention just real quick, I’m disappointed they played zero songs off of Pornography at this show. That is their second best album of all time, come on.
“A Forest” followed, and well fuck yes, more Seventeen Seconds as promised. This one is another all timer for The Cure and considering Blossom is located in an actual national park, it was mandatory they included this song in the set. This is my second favorite song on that album and pre-Pornography in general from The Cure, loved to see it and they just continued to sound phenomenal as the show went on. Even The Cure’s worst 80’s album, The Top got an inclusion in the set with “Shake Dog Shake”, a song that has more of an edge to it than most on that album and has been a set staple for decades. It’s a song I’ve not heard much compared to the The Cure’s stuff I bump regularly but I thought it was a fine live rendition.
They really, really got the fog machines pumping for the performance of the sprawling Wish album cut “From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea”. This is one of my favorites from that album, a very good album from which there was an obvious other song later played, but that’s it for representing The Cure’s breakout into the 90’s album. This was probably the first song of the night besides “Pictures of You” to push the 8 minute mark, so it was time to settle into that slow motion groove not unlike the crowd at an actual 1992 Wish tour The Cure show. To wrap up before the first of two set breaks came another new song appropriately known as “The Endsong”. Yeah, it’s a long depressing feel bad downer that went on for about 7 or 8 minutes if I had to guess. I applaud The Cure for performing all this new music that may or may not come out in proper recordings ever at this point. Unlike snooze inducing hippie jam bands, The Cure play live shows full of long songs not on the studio albums and don’t suck. They make standing on a soggy sloped lawn with trench foot for three hours feel like standing on the beach and staring at the sea.
I’m assuming due to the rain delay, they didn’t take much of a set break at all when they started playing even more new material from this mysterious, yet-to-release new album that’s been talked about longer than the last Tool album even was at this point. These new songs all kinda capture the same long, dark and moody sounds of their memorable “trilogy” of albums Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers in favoring the more spread out, droning, miserable end of their wide palate of styles over the years. The song “I Can Never Say Goodbye” was dedicated to Robert Smith’s late brother, this might be the best one yet out of any of these new songs I’ve heard. The other one “It Can Never Be the Same” also follows in the expectations from a song given that sort of title. “It can never be the same” is probably what I’ll end up saying about the album when it eventually comes out in 2033 and the band is living in a retirement community. Interestingly enough, next came a song from one of The Cure’s more forgettable records Wild Mood Swings from 1996 with “Want”. I don’t think I was really expecting this or too familiar with it at all, I actually have a CD of Wild Mood Swings but listened to it once ever and that was enough for me. This is probably the only song on that entire album that sounds like Wish era The Cure from what I recall, it sounded good live. It was also the newest song they did besides the Songs Of A Lost World material at only 27 years old.
But some things always sound great. The Cure’s performance of “Plainsong” was led by a crowd singing along “I think it’s dark and it looks like rain”. Yes. That was the theme of the whole fucking night and the weather sure delivered, just for The Cure to respond even harder and darker. Maybe the most appropriate song for the vibe of the night yet and for sure a favorite of mine. Amazing light show in particular for “Plainsong” too. I cannot praise enough how good The Cure still sounds performing this material nearly 35 years later, let alone preceding material like Seventeen Seconds songs 45 years later. The Cure clearly pay attention to making sure they can replicate all their sonic details live with an incredible precision all these years later. “Disintegration” was next and needs no explanation. They clearly still got it in them to play these songs all these years later and sound incredible live to this day. My short video above gives it no justice at all and I have little else to say other than how great The Cure still are live, especially while playing their greatest songs.
The break for the second encore was more the first real encore break due to the storm delay. By this time I had nowhere to go but stay and wait with heavily drenched uphill climbs to overpriced beers in my surroundings. Before the band restarted, they announced that despite the venue curfew of 11:00 PM, they were going to perform their entire encore because of the storm delay. This is a big deal because every band that has ever performed at Blossom has an end around 11:00 PM due to being in a national park. The Cure once again proving themselves a band of the people and showing appreciation and respect for their fans, you love to see it. There’s something certain bands known for not releasing a new album for over a decade can learn from. Anyway, The Cure began their encore, which is more like “The Cure Greatest Hits of the 80’s that aren’t Lovesong” for this set. I wonder if there’s a lot of people who help sell out The Cure shows by showing up expecting only these songs instead of 2 hours of pummeling, feel bad downers interspersed between each other with a couple of manic bops you might remember from old movie soundtracks performed before them. They began with “Lullaby”. “Lullaby” again needs no explanation and their performance of this song in 2023 sounds as great as 1989, at least to me.
The rest of the encore was heavy on The Head On the Door, with “Six Different Ways” introduced by Robert Smith playing a goofy handheld keytar sorta thing he openly said he hated playing and sounded great. “The Walk” was cool but another one I really can’t say I’ve ever listened to much. But it was “Friday I’m In Love” which was probably the first The Cure song I’d ever remembered hearing as a kid. This was a real blatant earworm of a pop song back when Wish first came out and was a massive mainstream pop hit. This is probably my least favorite The Cure song, but if there’s a song by this band you can’t get away from it’s probably this one. I saw a song that I hear in supermarkets performed live. But then it was “Close to Me” right back to the good hits and yeah, I’m just gonna keep repeating myself. All the songs were great. “Why Can’t I Be You?”, “Just Like Heaven”, “In Between Days”, and finally ending where it all started with “Boys Don’t Cry”. What a set. The Cure show no signs of resting on their past glory when it comes to live performances, here in their sixth decade as a band. Maybe someday we’ll hear actual album recordings of Songs Of A Lost World. But until then, you really have no excuse for not attending a show from this legendary band if it happens to come near you, see The Cure while they’re still around.
VS. MusicK 