There are varying opinions about when The Cure stopped being great - some say they're still great, some say they peaked with Disintegration and are on the way down ever since, some say they couldn't really recover after Pearl (known as Porl at the time) and Boris left, but I truly enjoyed Wild Mood Swings (not a flawless album, but definitely not as bad as people usually think), I really liked Wrong Number and then the Bloodflowers album, and even Cut Here was really good (let's forget about Just Say Yes for a moment), so I was quite happy with their output until they left Fiction. I'm not suggesting that leaving the label was what caused the decline, but something went wrong after that.
It's safe to say that their 2004 self-titled album is not extremely popular. The overall sound was quite different from what we were used to, and not in a good way. The album's producer, Ross Robinson quickly became the scapegoat for most fans, but I blamed Robert. Obviously the fact that most of the band didn't enjoy the recording process at all and the end result being not particularly good shouldn't be ignored, but even if Ross is behind every single thing that went wrong, The Cure are ultimately Robert's band, he has the final word, and if he thought the album wasn't good enough, he would have changed what he didn't like about it.
In 2005, the band's line up was changed for the first time since 1995 (ending the longest run in the band's history), and although I wasn't thrilled about the "no keyboards" idea, a bit of refreshing was probably necessary. The new four-piece played a few shows in the summer, and planned to start working on a new album soon after that. Despite not being very busy the following year - they played one concert, released the next 3 albums in the remastered series and an alarmingly low-quality live dvd compilation of the 2005 Festival Tour - they couldn't finish it, so it seemed that 2007 would be the year when they finally get to the end of it. Unfortunately, after a quick run of shows in Asia and Australia, they had to postpone an entire North American Tour scheduled for the autumn of that year (only a festival date and 3 shows in Mexico were held), to put the finishing touches on the long awaited new record. You may have guessed, the album wasn't out when the band started the European Tour in February 2008, but at least some news followed shortly: 4 singles were scheduled to be released on the 13th of 4 consecutive months starting in May, and then the album should have followed those. It meant that even the postponed US Tour would be finished months before the album release, but at least we got 2 new songs per month on the way. It wasn't even surprising that we got a remix EP in September to buy some more time, and then finally, even missing the well worked out "13th of every month" schedule by 2 weeks, 4:13 Dream arrived at the end of October. And although Ross Robinson had nothing to do with it, it didn't sound any better than its predecessor. The even more disturbing part was that despite being worked on for years and years, the songs felt like they were just thrown together. On 5 or 6 of the 8 songs we got on the singles, the vocals start in the first 10 seconds and end within the last 10 seconds, there were no intros and outros, no distinctive melodies or memorable parts, almost as if they were making them up as they went along. I'm not saying that every song has to have long instrumental parts (for example, I really like songs like Return or There Is No If, which are constructed in a similar way), but when it feels like every song is like that, it points towards lack of ideas. And we haven't heard any new original material ever since.
Let's look at some other aspects of the band after 2001. They're still active as a live act, so it might seem odd that the last time they did a proper album tour was in 2000. Only releasing 2 studio albums after that surely plays a part, but in 2004 they only played on festivals in Europe and then did a weird and not entirely successful festival-type tour in North America called Curiosa, and as I mentioned above, they finished the tour before the album the next time. On the plus side, the live sound improved recently with Roger's return, and the sheer amount of songs they usually play at a gig is impressive in itself, and stuff like the Reflection shows in 2011 or the London gigs highlighting The Top album last December are truly special.
In 2004, they started a series of remastered releases from the back catalogue with the simply amazing Join The Dots compilation, followed by deluxe editions of the studio albums with bonus discs. After a promising start of the debut album re-release in 2004, the next 3 arriving the following year and 3 more in the year after that, the project ground to a halt, only one more item followed in 2010. Although promised a few times, none of the band's earlier video releases (originally available on vhs) made it to dvd, and with the format seeming quite obsolete now, it seems unlikely they ever will. There were plans for some new live video releases (the Paris 2008 show and the Reflection shows), and there should be a complete album's worth of material left from the 4:13 Dream sessions (which I'm not too excited about based on what's been released), but they're still nowhere in sight. I'm fairly certain that record companies played some part in these plans never materializing, but it doesn't make the situation any better.
I might come off as somewhat bitter or at least disappointed by all this, but that's not entirely true. Not liking their last 2 albums convinced me that I'm not totally biased, I don't automatically accept anything from my favourite bands, I'm still capable of forming an opinion based on the actual music. Also, I never thought of any artist as someone whose job is to satisfy my needs and fulfil my expectations. Even if I don't enjoy the end product, I still like the fact that they do whatever they want, they're willing to try out new things and simply repeating themselves is not good enough. Seeing them as if they've completely given up on creativity is not ideal, but even if they don't do anything noteworthy ever again, there'd still be hundreds of songs to listen to, and lots of great memories.
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