January 6, 2021
MANIPULATION, ANYONE?
Unlike most of the other tracks on this album, Wendy Time is not a lovely track to listen to, but if you’re writing a tune about shameless manipulation and terrible pick-up lines, you probably don’t want a lovely tune – but one that reflects the nausea-inducing scenario related. And in that sense, the tune really fits, its unpleasantness and discord appropriate for the topic. Although this is not a song I’d go out of my way to listen to for its aesthetic appeal, I do applaud its inclusion on this album for thematic reasons.
There’s a whole swag of love-gone-wrong songs on Wish – and here’s one situation that could head that way but never does, because it’s nipped in the bud by the target of the manipulation, who is wise to it – which has me cheering, because so many people fall for this sort of thing.
The lyrics are pretty straightforward, just basic storytelling:
WENDY TIME
“You look like you could do with a friend,” she said
“You look like you could use a hand
Someone to make you smile,” she said
“Someone who can understand
Share your trouble
Comfort you
Hold you close
And I can do all of these…
I think you need me here with you”
“You look like you could do with a sister” she said
“You look like you need a girl to call your own… like…
Fabulous! Fabulous!
Call me Fabulous!”
And rubbing her hands so slow
“You stare at me all strange,” she said
“Are you hungry for more?”
“I’ve had enough,” I said
“Please leave me alone
Please go”
It doesn’t touch me at all
It doesn’t touch me at all
“You know that you could do with a friend,” she said
“You know that you could use a word
Like feel or follow or fuck,” she said
And laughing away as she turned
“You’re everything but no-one
Like the last man on earth”
“And when I die,” I said
I’ll leave you it all”
Door closes…
Leaves me cold
It doesn’t touch me at all
It doesn’t touch me at all
“You really do need a sister,” she said
“You really do need a girl to call your own… like…
Wonderful! Wonderful!
Call me Wonderful!”
And running her hands so slow
“You stare at me all strange,” she said
“Are you hungry for more?”
“I’ve had enough,” I said
“Please leave me alone
Please go…
Please go”
It’s interesting for a female who’s seen atrocious pick-up lines and behaviour around trying to “score” from males to get a glimpse into the sordid world males may experience at the hands of females, on this theme. It’s a different flavour for sure. What flavour ice cream would you like – vomit or abscess? Blergh. 
The Cure, of course, explored an example of how the “other side” can look on a track called The Perfect Boy in 2008 – there’s a post on that one earlier in this series. The male in that and the female in Wendy Time – I just don’t get people like that. I understand they exist, I’ve seen it myself for many years, but it continues to boggle me. What sort of soul do you have, to be chiefly approaching the world and the beings in it in a grasping, predatory way?
Decent sexual ethics to me are primarily about crystal clarity, total honesty, clear consent, considered intention, respect and negotiation. It doesn’t matter to me how people want to go about this stuff apart from that – monogamy, polygamy, polyamory, casual sex, long-term, short-term, medium-term, hanging off the ceiling, whatever, as long as they’re clear about it and not misleading a person whose aspirations are different to their own. People make mistakes, for sure, but there’s a vast difference between blundering, and setting out to deceive, even if covertly, by equivocation and half-truths.
So, like the tune or not, from the point of view of getting people to have a think about that stuff, and perhaps even discuss it with each other, songs like Wendy Time are a valuable part of the general repertoire. 
Oh and…this line makes me laugh: “And when I die,” I said / I’ll leave you it all.” 
Totally perfect reply. It reminds me very much of Kaz Cooke’s menu of perfect replies for the body police and sexual harassment in Real Gorgeous, her BS-antidote book for teenage girls:
THEY say: “Show us your tits!”
YOU say: “You can always tell a bottle-fed baby!”THEY say: “You’re fat!”
YOU say: “I’m me-shaped!”
or – “Anything else? Perhaps you could write it down for me so I don’t forget.”
or – “Why don’t you grab your bottom lip and pull it over your head?”
etc etcTHEY say: “You’ve got no tits.”
YOU say: “Well, they’re bigger than your brain.”
or – “Your fly is undone.”
or – “Am I supposed to care what you think?”
etc etc
The next track I’m looking at is Open, which also struck me as fitting under this general theme. Before I get to the lyrics, I just have to mention how wonderful I think the music to this is. The opening bass notes have been an earworm for me these past couple of days; every time I’m waking up, I’m hearing those notes. Like with so many other tracks on Wish there’s such lovely interplay between the different guitars… it’s rare to have essentially two lead guitars plus bass in a contemporary band; let alone a third six-string guitarist, and that’s one reason a lot of Cure tracks remind me of string quartet playing, in the way the instruments are interweaving, and there’s depth and complexity in the music.
The drumming is fabulous on Wish (but no need to make rude and meaningless comparisons 
); the singing a real departure from previous albums and very, very effective, especially with the diverse added harmonies, including the whispered backings to Apart.
Let’s have a look at the words to Open:
OPEN
I really don’t know what I’m doing here
I really think I should’ve gone to bed tonight but…
“Just one drink
And there’re some people to meet you
I think that you’ll like them
I have to say we do
And I promise in less than than an hour we will honestly go…
Now why don’t I just get you another
While you just say hello…”
Yeah just say hello…
So I’m clutching it tight
Another glass in my hand
And my mouth and the smiles
Moving up as I stand up
Too close and too wide
And the smiles are too bright
And I breathe in too deep
And my head’s getting light
But the air is getting heavier and it’s closer
And I’m starting to sway
And the hands all on my shoulders don’t have names
And they won’t go away
So here I go
Here I go again…
Falling into strangers
And it’s only just eleven
And I’m staring like a child
Until someone slips me heaven
And I take it on my knees
Just like a thousand times before
And I get transfixed
That fixed
And I’m just looking at the floor
Just looking at the floor
Yeah I look at the floor…
And I’m starting to laugh
Like an animal in pain
And I’ve got blood on my hands
And I’ve got hands in my brain
And the first short retch
Leaves me gasping for more
And I stagger over screaming
On my way to the floor
And I’m back on my back
With the lights and the lies in my eyes
And the colour and the music’s too loud
And my head’s all the wrong size
So here I go
Here I go again…
Yeah I laugh and I jump
And I sing and I laugh
And I dance and I laugh
And I laugh and I laugh
And I can’t seem to think
Where this is
Who I am
Why I’m keeping this going
Keep pouring it out
Keep pouring it down
Keeping it going
Keep pouring it down
And the way the rain comes down hard…
That’s the way I feel inside…
I can’t take it anymore
This it I’ve become
This is it like I get
When my life’s going numb
I just keep moving my mouth
I just keep moving my feet
I say I’m loving you to death
Like I’m losing my breath
And all the smiles that I wear
And all the games that I play
And all the drinks that I mix
And I drink until I’m sick
And all the faces I make
And all the shapes that I throw
And all the people I meet
And all the words that I know
Makes me sick to the heart
Oh I feel so tired…
And the way the rain comes down hard…
That’s how I feel inside…
Yeah, wow. 
When I first listened to this song, I thought that the narrator was being manipulated by a friend/colleague/manager to do something he didn’t really want to do (have a drink and talk to people instead of going to bed – knowing where it leads in this case) – but that’s not clear-cut; the words in quotes may be uttered either to the narrator, or by the narrator. Either way, soon it’s just like dominoes all going down one after the other; like a chain reaction the narrator is aware of, but can’t pull himself out of. It’s evocatively described in such painful detail that you can easily put yourself in the narrator’s position, and shudder…
And I do really think that, substance addiction or not, these kinds of scenarios are so commonly created in the Anglo society I live in, where the social habits of a large swathe of the population can create a quicksand that people can fall into before they’re really aware of what’s going on, and if by then substance addiction has become a part of it, it can get hard to get out. I do, by the way, believe people have personal responsibility and a degree of free will they can exercise, and that they can’t blame the crowd or their drinking buddies once they’ve become aware of the trap – then it’s up to that person who has had that insight to find a way out of there. Once you wake up, you don’t need to be a victim of your circumstances anymore – although some people seem to prefer to remain in whatever undesirable situation it is, as a sort of perpetual victim – and others seem to need to stay at the bottom for a while, before finally making an effort to resurface.
I’m as human as the next person and I’m acutely aware that could have been me, as well, except I’ve always been a social outsider in situations involving peer group pressure – the moment that starts, whether about smoking, drinking, religion, Avon, Amway or anything else people are trying to foist onto me (in all cases, usually thinking they’re trying to share a good thing with me), I’m out of there. That’s been a lucky trait, I think, because I have at least two blood relatives who were alcoholics, and one of them even quite functional (and therefore in even deeper denial). Owing to a rough childhood, I already had enough on my plate, and it was really excellent that this shiitake wasn’t complicated by a substance addiction for me.
But, addictions come in all sorts of guises, some of which are even socially acceptable, and like any person, I’ve had struggles of my own to sort out, including with biochemical addiction to toxic relationships (my first romantic relationship, a subsequent crush, and my family of origin), which I’ve written about previously. I can’t tell you how good it felt to shake those particular shackles, and as regarded my family of origin, I didn’t really do that completely and properly until I was diagnosed with complex PTSD in my early 40s (the graphic flashbacks were really helpful in that process, and by the way, Bloodflowers, which I chanced upon on my husband’s iPod at the time, was an excellent aid with processing the raw emotions and re-building my world from the ground up).
Emotional honesty is an incredibly valuable thing. The more we can all do this, the better – although it’s often a rather rare commodity; and I think that’s one of the reasons why our mass communication bards tend to get put on a pedestal – if you don’t see it in the people immediately around you, but only in faraway figures, then it tends to be venerated in those figures, and you’ve then got essentially the same emotional process that allows cults to form. So, to solve this problem, more of us are going to have to be emotionally honest and open, and look out for one another. If you can’t find it around you, you can try to be the change you want to see – be the kind of person who would have been helpful to know when you were going through hell yourself. If you can be a small puzzle piece in the healing of others, you will find that your own wounds will start to heal too. That just seems to be the way these things work.
And by the way, I think that emotional honesty is on the increase – there’s much more of it in the younger generations than there was in my own GenX – and even some of my own generation are learning! 
Why is it good that songs like Open are written? Because they’re incredibly emotionally cathartic, generally both for the person writing it, and for people listening. Because they let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, and this teaches us empathy, and without empathy, we’re all doomed. Because it teaches us to look at things from perspectives we’ve perhaps not considered before. Because it shows us that the world is complex and has many shades of grey, and that there are no easy answers or one-size-fits-all solutions. Because it reminds us that the most important thing of all is to love one another, as far as that is possible and advisable, and to try to be a light, and to encourage the light of others, instead of squashing it. And because we’re human, it’s good to be reminded. ♥
Hooray! I’m now just two songs away from being able to tear the wrapper off the self-titled! 🥳
January 6, 2021
WRAPPING UP WISH, SO I CAN TEAR THE WRAPPER OFF THE NEXT ONE
The two tracks left to consider are Friday I’m In Love and Doing The Unstuck.
I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that this is not my favourite song – I really loathed this number for most of my life, chiefly because of constant oversaturation and that I don’t generally like pop music, or for that matter, rap or electronic music or heavy metal or boy bands or German ooompa-ooompa Oktoberfest music, and I will turn off the radio if something like this comes on, or run screaming if I can’t. The chief way I will make an exception and undertake to listen to things from these genres is if a person I love is asking me to because it means something to them – and this included student music presentations for English class, because I did genuinely love and respect my students. In that case I owe it to people to listen to their music, and suspend the judgement and personal tastes, and put myself in their shoes – which is actually a really good exercise.
On those occasions, all that goes to one side, and the focus is on the person who’s sharing something that’s important to them – it puts me in a different brain space, which turns off all these adverse reactions, and I’m glad that this is so, because I have vivid memories of my favourite music being ridiculed by my birth family, and swore never to do that to anyone else (that’s after I got chucked out of Year 12 English class one afternoon for laughing at Why Can’t I Be You and realising I was doing the same thing; and if only Pauline-of-the-black-spiky-hair had played the track immediately before that off the same album which was sitting there in that CD player, I’d not only have not been chucked out of the room, I’d have gone and bought the album…and instead it took me another quarter century to realise The Cure actually did other music too ).
…but, it’s pretty much all you’ll hear on Australian popular radio, by this band – and it’s one of the most played songs here, you can hear it every Friday (and run screaming), which really put me off The Cure (“OMG, not that band!”). So it was something of a surprise to me that, having turned this song off for 28 years, in the context of listening to Wish, I have no urge to turn it off at all. Because it fits and because the rest of Wish makes me forget all of that.
Scenic detour from memory lane: I actually remember the last time I heard Friday I’m In Love on the radio and didn’t turn it off or run away screaming. It was back in 2012, when we were building our house, and our genius carpenter was constructing the frame and roofing the place, while we were doing odd jobs in preparation for building the bale walls – the first thing on the build we were able to do ourselves.
Chris and his offsiders built this:
…while we prepped our wall build:
…and laid the very first bales:
…the first of maaaaany…
…but that was later. Sadly we don’t have a proper picture of Chris, because he was camera-shy, and because he never stood still long enough, so if we’d taken any photos of him on the sly, they’d have been blurry. 
It was at the early stage we had Chris on the building site, and he loves music, so brought his own large portable stereo, which he ran off the generator, because this was in the days before we had an off-grid solar-electric system. Chris didn’t bother playing CDs on the building site; he tuned the radio to Mix-FM (which his young offsider always referred to as “Fogey-FM” ) and blasted the site with the resulting soundwaves.
That’s when I last remember hearing Friday I’m In Love in full (and up really loud), on the radio – and I thought, “Oh no!” when it came on, but didn’t say anything – we love Chris, he’s a super person as well as an extremely good carpenter and roofer – and he actually started bouncing on his feet and beaming, and going, “I really like this! Do you?” He also liked Garbage, so Brett gave him all the B-sides he had from them.
Isn’t it funny how you can often go right back into a particular point of the film footage of the past, because of a song.
Back to the actual song, here’s a nice link to read: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-cures-friday-im-in-love-7-things-you-didnt-know-111331/
Here’s the official film clip, which I’ve never watched before:
Yeah. This really doesn’t recommend the band to me very much, sorry – and I’m not generally a video-clip watcher, anyway. This is a bit like when U2, in the 90s, were allegedly being ironic about being rock stars, and doing it a little too well – this is the kind of thing that sold me the idea that The Cure were a lightweight pop outfit – as it will, if it’s all you ever see.
In some ways, The Cure are like a thickly iced carrot-walnut cake – I have to take the icing off to be able to enjoy the cake. And when all I ever saw was icing, I didn’t even know there was any cake. (And though I did always like Lullaby, I thought it was a one-off. )
Next song – last one to look at:
I first came across this on Join The Dots, as an extended version, and wrote about it on this thread. This was my brief comment at the time:
Doing The Unstuck is an odd one, to me. Elements of it I like, others I don’t. The thing I like best about it is the music starting about 45 seconds into it, and for about a minute from there; then it crosses in and out of borderline headachy for me. The topic isn’t bad, the presentation of it just a bit Playschool though – remove the mild sexual references, and you can have preschoolers bopping along to this and singing the words. Brett doesn’t like this one at all, and when I talk about the Playschool vibe, he smiles and says, “Well, guess who is the Dark Wiggle!”
That was nearly 18 months ago, and this is one of the songs that really grew on me. The version on Wish is very together, but my favourite bit is still the instrumental stuff from about 45 seconds into the extended version off the B-sides. I still think this song is a bit Playschool, but not nearly as Playschool as the video to Friday I’m In Love, which I think pre-schoolers would totally adore. My inner pre-schooler kind of doesn’t; she was always dressing up as a Native American and being serious, and she’s still doing that.
It’s only in the last post I was looking at childlike versus childish, and I suppose we each draw our lines differently. Having said that, becoming a fan of The Cure’s more serious music has made me a little more receptive to their shinier stuff, and that’s probably the reverse of how it works for many others, who maybe get lured into buying an album because of a shiny pop song from the radio, and then may get the surprise of their lives.
These days, I see Doing The Unstuck as something of a mental health song, and enjoy it. Let’s have a look at the words… I’m going to do a bit of annotating on this one as I go…
DOING THE UNSTUCK
It’s a perfect day for letting go
For setting fire to bridges
Boats
And other dreary worlds you know
…usually we’re supposed to build bridges, but sometimes it’s better to burn them – at the risk of sounding like Ecclesiastes (or the Byrds)…this verse is a bit cryptic, but perhaps “boats” are another means of crossing over to another side you’ve decided you no longer want to visit, once you’ve burnt the bridge. This might be breaking with people who are net-negative for your life, after trying other things; or distancing yourself from difficult family members, emotionally or otherwise; things like that, and yes, speaking from experience, it can be a really good idea to do something like this – go where you’re loved for who you are, and where you love people for who they are, instead – breaking away from negative relationships leaves you so much more energy to do that, and can have a net-positive effect both on your own life and mental/emotional health, and on your ability to be a good person to be around, for those who do love and respect you.
…and on another level, you might be burning bridges by throwing out your TV aerial or de-programming the commercial channels from your TV, so that you don’t get sucked down into wasting your life with the propaganda, brainwash and 24-hour news cycle offered by many stations, and just retain things like (in Australia) the ABC and the multicultural broadcaster SBS and indigenous channel NITV, where you can actually learn something useful. This is again about energy, learning, etc instead of time-and-energy-sucks and treading water.
…and that’s really like not going shopping hungry, but after a meal and with a list, so you’re making choices with your cerebrum and none of the little tricks supermarkets employ to get you to buy the wrong stuff (which is the stuff that’s rubbish for you, the community and the environment, but has high profit margins for them) are going to work. Or, you can just stop shopping at supermarkets altogether, or at least cut it back, and find a nice greengrocer and butcher and fishmonger and farmer’s market instead, and perhaps start growing some of your own food in your backyard, or in an allotment etc.
…things like this: Thinking about your life and making choices that are better for your health, relationships, happiness etc
Let’s get happy!
It’s a perfect day for making out
To wake up with a smile
Without a doubt
To burst grin giggle bliss skip jump sing and shout
Let’s get happy!
…after the first two lines here, we’re now digging down to child level inside, because that’s what children do and that’s what we also can determine to do. I’ve never given up skipping, for instance; I still do that. Sometimes my husband and I impersonate kangaroos and start hopping around the dinner table together in a strange game of chasey. Why not? It’s exactly the sort of thing I did as a kid. It’s fantastic physical exercise, it’s interaction, and it releases a boatload of endorphins into your bloodstream. Much better than being a “serious adult” all the time and going to Big Pharma for anti-depressants. I think we need to be every age we’ve ever been, take the best from all of them, mix it up a bit.
“But it’s much too late” you say
“For doing this now
We should have done it then”
Well it just goes to show
How wrong you can be
And how you really should know
That it’s never too late
To get up and go…
…there’s a common objection, and a commonsense response…better late than never, etc
It’s a perfect day for kiss and swell
For rip-zipping button-popping kiss and well…
There’s loads of other stuff can make you yell
Let’s get happy!
…there’s a couple of ways to read these words, but the theme is pretty much the same. It’s clever to use a word so that different denotations of it could apply equally, as has been done here.
It’s a perfect day for doing the unstuck
For dancing like you can’t hear the beat
And you don’t give a further thought
Hahaha. The short pause in delivery while your mind rhymes, only to change the word. I’ve seen this before in the Cure catalogue, it just escapes me which song it was…
To things like feet
Let’s get happy!
The verse as a whole is a bit like, “Dance as if nobody can see you, love as if your heart has never been broken.” It’s a good thing not to be constrained by other people’s judgement or by your own adverse experiences, if you can swing it.
“But it’s much too late” you say
“For doing this now
We should have done it then”
Well it just goes to show
How wrong you can be
And how you really should know
That it’s never too late
To get up and go…
Kick out the gloom
Kick out the blues
Tear out the pages with all the bad news
Sometimes you really can decide to do that; it’s a mindset, a determination, and I think it’s a good thing to keep in your repertoire…
Pull down the mirrors and pull down the walls
Tear up the stairs and tear up the floors
Oh just burn down the house!
Burn down the street!
Turn everything red and the beat is complete
With the sound of your world
Going up in the fire
It’s a perfect day to throw back your head
And kiss it all goodbye!
The narrator started with the mirror here, which made me think of the tendency a lot of us have to look at ourselves critically, and so mirrors aren’t necessarily loaded with positive vibes for us. He doesn’t stop there, however – he tears down the whole house and sets it on fire. Nice metaphor, and it conveys this idea that you hear from people who have lost most of their possessions in bushfires, that as awful as that has been, they understand what’s really important in life, and it’s not material possessions – they’re just stuff, and much of it can be replaced, should you want to. What’s really important is being alive, and the people you love. You don’t literally have to burn down your house, either – you can sell it, think of it differently, etc. Diogenes famously went as far as living in a barrel, because he thought that people become slaves to their possessions, and there’s much truth in this, and that’s one of many good reasons many people are now interested in Tiny Houses.
It’s a perfect day for getting wild
Forgetting all your worries
Life
And everything that makes you cry
Let’s get happy!
It’s a perfect day for dreams come true
For thinking big
And doing anything you want to do
Let’s get happy!
Yeah, that’s nice – it’s important to throw the cultural conditioning and social constraints off regularly, and also our own mental ruts, more than anything, I think! Isn’t it ironic (and also handy!) that often, the way to a happier day is just a determination to make it so?
“But it’s much too late” you say
“For doing this now
We should have done it then”
Well it just goes to show
How wrong you can be
And how you really should know
That it’s never too late
To get up and go…
Kick out the gloom
Kick out the blues
Tear out the pages with all the bad news
Pull down the mirrors and pull down the walls
Tear up the stairs and tear up the floors
Oh just burn down the house!
Burn down the street!
Turn everything red and the dream is complete
With the sound of your world
Going up in the fire
It’s a perfect day to throw back your head
And kiss it all goodbye!
Very nice! And I still like the jangly, rolling bit of instrumental music near the start of the extended version best, musically speaking!
And that’s the end of looking at Wish, at least for now. 
January 10, 2021
Having wrapped up my initial tour of Wish, I can now I can go listen to the other two albums that arrived here late last year. 🥳
Just before I do, though, a quick summary of how the Cure studio albums I’ve listened to so far gel with me personally. Here’s a pictorial representation:
Bloodflowers
Disintegration / KMKMKM / Wish (no particular order)
The Top / Wild Mood Swings / 4:13 Dream / The Head On The Door (no particular order)
Japanese Whispers (not an album, but still)
In other words, so far, Bloodflowers is my personal favourite, followed very closely by Disintegration, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Wish, in no particular order. They’re all albums I tend to play from start to finish, with few if any songs that I want to skip – in other words, they are albums I tend to listen to as albums, and they have many, many songs on them I really love, relate to etc etc.
The next tier for me so far contains The Top, Wild Mood Swings, 4:13 Dream, and The Head On The Door, again in no particular order. I’m glad to have these albums in the house, and there’s collectively a lot of songs on them I love, but I tend not to listen to these all the way through, just in brackets. With Wild Mood Swings and 4:13 Dream there are at least two tracks on each that I very much dislike and therefore tend to skip altogether (see here). While I skip two on KMKMKM as well, it’s a double album. The Head On The Door overall didn’t quite gel with me the same way as a lot of the others, probably because it was distinctly 80s in flavour, but Sinking is a favourite off it.
Japanese Whispers is not an album, just something we bought a few years ago at a music store closing-down sale, and when we listened to it, we really hated most of it! No amount of trying again made it any better. The three tracks on it we wouldn’t throw away are already on the Greatest Hits and get played live a bit, so we’d not replace this CD if it accidentally came to grief, or turned into a bat and flew away. 
I think Love Cats is a very good song and The Walk isn’t bad, apart from its awful bloody 80s keyboards. Let’s Go To Bed isn’t our favourite, but we’d keep it mostly for historical reasons.
How would you arrange your Cure album groups? Or do you actually number them from most favourite to least? I can’t do that – I think there’s so much stuff that’s equivalent in quality and appeal to me, I just put them in different tiers.
By the way, here’s how @MAtT, an all-the-way-back fan who’s listened to everything and lots of bootlegs as well, arranged his:
For me, in the grand scheme of things for me, HOTD is a lower tier Cure album. It’s better than the post 2000 offerings and (maybe) WMS, it’s up there with Three Imaginary Boys & Wish, but (just) below The Top. And it’s nowhere near the fantastic, mature diversity of Kiss Me, the mature class of Disintegration and Bloodflowers, or the ultimate raw genius of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography.
(All subjective I know!)
Quote from: MAtT on August 17, 2020, 08:49:27
His original post on that goes into more detail and is worth checking out – just click the link in the quote to go there.
Five studio albums to go – and the new one in the works, for which I have great hopes, considering that the two most recent, standalone Cure songs in the public repertoire – It Can Never Be The Same and Step Into The Light (which I looked at earlier in this thread) to me are right up there with Bloodflowers. ♥
Unlike some of you who’ve been disappointed by the delay of the upcoming album, I like to think it’s just being made even better in the meantime, and anyway, I’m still very busy working my way through albums I’ve not heard before! 
PS: I’ve just realised I’ve still not looked at any lyrics for KMKMKM on this open journal – that got forgotten because I was actually listening to two “new” Cure albums at the same time, I think. Some day I may well remedy this (and I’m now doing exactly this here). Also of course, there’s whole albums I’ve not written about much here because I already had them before I joined this forum 18 months ago…