Customers who enjoyed The Cure should also enjoy:

The Smiths' The Queen is Dead. Joy Division's Closer. The Cure's Pornography. PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love. The Rapture's Echoes. The Cure's Disintegration. The Walkmen's Bows + Arrows. New Order's Substance. Primal Scream's Screamadelica. The Fall's This Nation's Saving Grace. The Cure's The Head On the Door. Pere Ubu's Dub Housing.

Listen. The new Cure album is all right. For a band turning a quarter century it's a pretty fresh-sounding record. "The End of the World" is a good single, and "Before Three" manages to stand out too. Robert Smith still has a great voice, and it'll still make you sorta sad, even if you don't exactly know why. But it's just a Cure album like so many others: dark, melodic and ultimately pretty forgettable. You can't deny The Cure put out some good records in its day, but just about anything the band does now is only going to serve as a reminder of when they were actually up to something new.

It's a little heavier than most Cure records, and there's only one really obnoxiously long song (unlike most Cure albums, which usually have at least three), but that's really all that sets it apart. This isn't a masterpiece like Disintegration, nor is it even as good as 2000's uneven Bloodflowers. It's just more Cure.

If you absolutely, positively need a new Cure album, you could definitely do worse. But if you're on the fence, I'd try one of the records on top. They're dark and melodic, too, but unlike The Cure, they're anything but more of the same.

-- Reviewed by Paul Thompson