2/1/2000 Visions
The second midlife crisis
After the astonishing happy sounds of "Wild Mood Swings", Cure-boss Robert Smith falls back to the well-known melancholy. Originally "Bloodflowers" should have been released in 1998, a second release date was assumed to be in spring 1999 and has been pushed back without any comments, too. Now "Bloodflowers" will be released definetely on february 14th and Robert Smith explains the delay like this:
"When I met the band for the first discussions on the album I already had an exact imagination on how the album should sound like. But I had mouldy feelings because we hadnīt played together for a long time. So I suggested to play a few festivals first. And like I feared, there were a lot of problems in the band that took place during the festival tour. There were really hateful discussions and quarrels." At last this was like a cleansing thunderstorm and now Robert is glad that this happened on tour and not in the studio. And, differently from the past, The Cure survived this phase undamaged, no one left the band and Smith has fired nobody.
They recorded "Bloodflowers" instead, an album that reminds tendentiously in itīs mood of more melancholic works like "Disinitegration". The songs are intense, the lyrics are very intimate and very gloomy. "This album is quite parallel to "Disintegration". When I wrote it I got 30 - a point where many people look back and reflect on what they did in the last ten years. With "Bloodflowers" itīs similar, as I turned from 39 to 40. For this reason I wanted to make a very honest autobiographical album." More on this in the next issue.
- Stefan Woldach
