Friday I'm in bloody flower-pain

Anyway, the band started playing, and almost immediately, this guy behind us started taunting them: "You suck! You suck! You suck!" Which, I might add, was not entirely uncalled for—the drummer kept stumbling off the beat into jagged jazz fills, and the keyboardist actually fell asleep during a few of the songs. Still, what did you expect on a Tuesday night on the West Side? The guy kept taunting, though. You could hear him even during the songs. Usually stuff like this doesn't bother me. I ignored it for a little while. But as he shouted down a version of "Who Wants to Buy This Town," I decided to shut him up. So I wheeled around with a mean look on my face.

"What do you want?" the guy shrieked. It was Robert Smith. He smelled like armpit. "Sorry," I said, motioning to Dale that it was Robert Smith behind us. Dale's a skeptical guy. He said, "That's not Robert Smith—that's just someone who looks exactly like Robert Smith," and he never mentioned it again.

The moral of the story is that either Robert Smith hates tributes, or else people who pay tribute to his looks hate people who pay tribute to his music.

All of which leads me to wonder whether Smith really likes the Cure's 377th album, Bloodflowers. It's essentially a tribute to the Cure's other 376 albums by a band that looks like the Cure (though at times lacks the sallow verve that made them better than sallow bands like the Verve). When Smith sings "Nothing is new, nothing I think or believe in or say," you have to wonder why he didn't put this information to any good use.

Not that Cure fans won't get something out of this. If, by chance, one of them wasn't feeling suicidal one fine Friday, Bloodflowers would pretty much take care of that. The title track, for example: "Flowers of love always fade, always die, I let fall flowers of blood." (By the way, what's a flower of blood?) This in contrast to the more measured "Where the Birds Always Sing," which opens a world where, for better or worse, "nothing ever dies." I think I wrote a poem about that world back in seventh grade when I couldn't get any girls to go out with me.

Still, taking Smith's lyrics out of context wouldn't be fair (though, as those same lyrics attest, "the world is neither fair, nor unfair"). Everything comes together into a sort of Wagnerian rock opera where the lyrics are supposed to be sappy and the music is supposed to sound like the soundtrack to eternity in hell.

So "Bloodflowers" delivers what it promises: 11-minute songs, long instrumental intros, bad-ass lyrics, weepy guitars, six-string basses, and even a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson that sums things up nicely: "I know not what they mean/tears from the depth of...despair/rise in the heart.../in...thinking of the days that are no more." (Elektra)

—Ian Blecher

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