This is the end of every song that we sing

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

08/11/24 : Songs Of A Lost World - The Cure

Last week Tears For Fears gave us Songs For A Nervous Planet and this week The Cure suggest things are getting worse - are they commenting on the US election? I'm expecting this to be fine, if not exactly essential (the album, not the fallout from the election).

Actually, I'd say this is better than fine - I really quite liked it (except for "Drone:nodrone" which is just a noisy mess). It's got a real sense of mortality to it with some nicely possibly meaningful lyrics that would definitely stand up to a further listen or three. It's not going to convert anyone into a massive Cure fan, but it feels like there's plenty here for the fans and the casual listener.

We're at, once again, #1 with a new entry (we've seen quite a few of them from older bands this year) and the rest of the top five are Sabrina Carpenter, Tyler, The Creator (the lad has done well to stay so high in the chart), Charli XCX and Ed Sheeran. Somewhat surprisingly, the next highest new entry is Lil Uzi Vert (#47 - and I knew I wasn't going to like this before I listened to it. And I very much didn't) and the only other one in the whole chart is Chase Atlantic (#88 - this is surprisingly similar to Lil Uzi, but not quite so dreadful).

Last week I said that Tyler would drop to #23 and we've already seen I was a massive twenty places out - I don't really understand quite why so many people were listening to this but there you go. I feel harsh for saying so but I suspect The Cure are going to be a "one and done" album - I suspect the vinyl and CD copies will be listened to on repeat but that's not going to get them any chart places (but I'll be very happy if I turn out to be wrong here). And this week's Taylor stats are none in the top ten, four in the top thirty and eight in the entire chart - a slight resurgence for the lass.

Wikipedia tells us this is their fourteenth album and their first in 16 years and most of the rest of the entry is random background information, including the fascinating information that the vinyl version was released in six formats in the UK - black, marble stone, marble stone with obi, white, picture disc and picture disc 'glow in the dark'! The critics were very nice about it with The Irish Times calling it "majestically desolate, gorgeously grim", which I guess is a compliment. It's been very successful commercially getting to #1 in Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Sweden as well as here (their first since '92). Interestingly, it also give us a breakdown of the 51,362 sales in UK as 19,838 CDs, 23,182 vinyl albums, 1,219 cassettes, 4,546 digital downloads and 2,577 sales-equivalent streams - there are way more cassette and download sales than I was expecting.

"Customers also listened to" Pixies, The Smiths, Joy Division and Tears For Fears - some proper joy merchants there and no mistake. We can't all be happy-smiley all the time though and The Cure lean into the dark side nicely, without (for me) going all in here - whilst they accept that things have to end, they're at least trying to remember some of the good that came before. I "enjoyed" this and think it's well worth checking out.

01/11/24 - A peculiar one
15/11/24 - Something slightly different