If you follow the emotional trajectory of The Cure's first four albums, the mood goes steeply downhill until you hit bottom with the bleak and harrowing Pornography, wherein Robert Smith stares so long and so hard at the abyss that it nearly swallows him. Two years after Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, by far The Cure's most successful album, the obvious move would have been for the band to create another album full of perishable ditties like "Why Can't I Be You?", but instead Robert's gone a-wallowing again. The sound and mood here recall their early albums' mournful, synth-heavy bleakness mixed with their last LP's lush, intricate arrangements and more precise songwriting style. It's also their most beautifully recorded album, where all the textures shimmer and glow. Still, a lot of the tracks here simply won't fly on today's radio, but several will: the single "Fascination Street" and its twisted non-LP B-side "Babble," the haunting "Pictures Of You" (which should be the second single), "Lullaby," "Lovesong, and especially the almost ballad-ish "Untitled," an uncharacteristically gentle song that closes the album, At a time when The Cure could have turned shamefully predictable, they've produced a decidedly downbeat album that's about as far from a sell-out as they could possibly have gone,

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