THE CURE Songs of a Lost World Fiction/Capitol

The Cure were never better than on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, when Robert Smith was playing Buster Poindexter’s character in Scrooged as an orchestra of midi horns funked up the afterlife behind him. In their artificial brassiness, “Hot Hot Hot!!!” and “Why Can’t I Be You?” were as close to a cyborg utopia as humanity would reach before the timeline diverged and we ended up in our current soy lent reality. In a twist appropriate to our times, it’s become a consensus opinion over the past couple decades that Disintegration, the 80 percent brilliant album from 1989, is the Cure’s masterpiece. That album contained some of the greatest postpunk ballads of the ’80s, and drenched them all in cascading wind chimes and CD run-time. This has resulted in generations of musicians thinking that they don’t have to write a “Fascination Street” as long as they remember to smear the lens. Now, it would appear that the lie that Robert Smith is better as a Hamlet than as a Muppet has sunk far enough into the gothic strata that it’s reached the source. Thank God nobody told the Cure’s rhythm section of Simon Gallup and Jason Cooper. Otherwise, we might be in trouble.