The Cure Bloodflowers Poll (sorry, no fancy-schmancy, too-clever "POLLflowers" crap title for this one [except, you know, in parentheses])

If it were possible I would set "Where the Birds Always Sing" on fire and dance around it pointing and laughing as it burned to a crisp.

HI DERE not in NYC

Actually, I forgot that "The Last Day of Summer" is pretty great!

never heard it I don't think

It's kind of a pandering album but it's also kind of great. Except for "Where The Birds Always Sing" which is fucking horrible and should never, ever, ever have been recorded.

wow this is a boring record.

Never really got into the record for the record itself...considering the buildup ("It's the third in a trilogy with your two other favourite Cure albums!!!") it was really a disappointment...plodding, pandering and very much lifeless. That said, the songs worked a lot better in concert, so it wasn't a complete disaster. But for me this was really a confirmation that The Cure wasn't doing it for me any more.

^^^This. Except "Maybe Someday", which I like quite a lot.

But yeah, the album does come across better on the Trilogy DVD, yet even there, it pales next to the Pornography and Disintegration sets.

yeah it's a very unfair comparison for them to have set this up as though there was some intentional emotional thread through these; disintegration wasn't intended to be some "follow up in spirit" to Pornography, so that whole thing is really forced and stupid. And since both of those records are so much better than Bloodflowers, I don't even understand why they did this; I guess Smith honestly felt it was on par with those but, wow, delusion.

This might have been the last POLL of the summer, you know ;)

akm otm!

Obviously the answer is 39, although Watching Me Fall brings the house down too

Sean C and akm very much otm. I remember being so excited about this and then realizing after a while that it was just kinda boring. I'll probably vote for 'Maybe Someday'

Just listened again, for the first time in ages, and "The Loudest Sound" is nice, too.

I think I'm gonna go for the title track. Though to be honest, I fucking adore all but two ("Birds" and "No If") of these songs.

"Where the Birds..." is the only flat-out bad song on here. The others succeed to different degrees; the on e that I think is most successful as a total package in terms of song construction/performance is "The Loudest Sound" (narrowly over "Out Of This World" and "Bloodflowers").

I don't really mind "Birds", except the lyrics which are kinda pompous and trite. The one I aways skip is "39" which is a disaster both lyrically and musically.

wut

"39" works pretty well lyrically IMO; the actual performance is good on the surface but sort of falls apart when you dig into it, mostly because it's completely out of balance (IIRC Simon basically overwhelms the song, and not in a good way).

At first I thought 39 wasted a supremely promising start by blathering on up the wrong tree, but then it clicked and now I love it from start to finish. As I said on the Wish thread, it's another 7-minute excursion built around quite a strident keyboard loop, which works really nicely, because Smith knows how to structure a narrative around a core like few others. Besides, when the bass goes up rather than down during the first verse, it is godlike. And the guitars are great!

The bridge is where that song really shines; I like that part so much that I spend most of the rest of the song annoyed that I'm not listening to the bridge.

Oh and the drumming! The bridge is delightfully hysterical, yeah, orchestra stabs and all. There's two really neat solos in the song as well...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i really think this album is underrated. this has more about seeing them for this tour then the actual album. still think this album is great and voted for "Watching Me Fall" though "39" and "Bloodflowers" are also great.

I also think this is an underrated album. Most of the songs are very good. Even "Where The Birds Always Sing", which I think only the vocals make a little flat. It is really well written, I love the way the intro becomes the outro.
"Watching Me Fall" drags a little and would've been better with a BPM like "One Hundred Years". And "Maybe Someday" should have been poppier, the way "A Forest" ,"Primary" or "Lovesong" made great singles on cohesive albums.
The rest of the songs are great the way they are, my favorites being "The Last Day Of Summer", "The Loudest Sound", and "Out Of This World".

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Okay fucking travesty that someone voted for the worst fucking song on the album

I relistened to this today thinking of this thread, I don't think I voted, but it would have been for either the first song or "last day of summer", everything else is so boring or bad I could barely finish it.

Hahahaha OOTW got no votes! Awesome! Really not sure about the title-track, mind. Its resolution is a bit pat. Dare I say weak. Glad to see some 39 love.

The Last Day of Summer way too low.

That's the problem with being everyone's second-favorite song!

i'm surprised at the animosity Where the Birds received on this thread. Also, I don't think this record is as bad as I thought it was 6 years ago. It's kind of boring but that's it's worst crime.

Not a bad song on here, if you ask me. Although, a couple of the non-album versions of songs are arguably better than the proper versions: the Paul Oakenfold remix of 'Out of This World' is excellent and the "Acoustic Mix" (not actually acoustic) of 'Maybe Someday' just has a bit more theatrics in the build up to the riff.

I'm not surprised at the dislike for 'Where The Birds Always Sing' at all - it's always been my least favourite on the album and I find it a bit of a momentum killer. There's parts I like about it - I think it has a great intro, for one, but the song itself doesn't really gel for me.

I probably would have voted for the title track, which has legitimately become an all-time Cure favourite for me. It's a beautiful enough song without it, but when the "between you and me..." section kicks in, oh man.

the cover art is terrible and cheap looking though. I honestly think I'd like the album more with a better cover

Shocked that Out of This World didn't get a single vote. The Last Day of Summer should have done better too.

Yeah, akm OTM about the cover art, which doesn't really suit the record.

Yeah, I hadn't really listened to this album until the last week, and Out of This World is great! It might be my favorite, but I am assuming after a few more listens it will just be my second favorite.

The cover art IS terrible. It's just the worst.

https://www.stereogum.com/2070191/the-cure-bloodflowers-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/

I bought my last Cure LP in 1989. I read these threads to encourage myself to buy something released after that. The outcome is usually "don't bother".

in 20 years, i still haven't "gotten around" to Bloodflowers, or any others post WMS

Yer loss

I know there's some good stuff there, it was more a comment on how time flies. I've honestly been telling myself (for 20 years now!!) that I need to sit down and listen to this stuff, but the days/months/years zip by

"39" is sick af

As are “The Loudest Sound” and “The Last Day Of Summer”

kinda interesting to compare this to songs of a lost world now, it kinda has the opposite problem with its mix - both are very compressed but in soalw everything else is buried behind the synths while the synths on this are really buried, but that doesn't have as much of a negative impact because they're not usually doing very much here & you can hear the solos at least

"out of this world" and "last day of summer" are kinda the same song but it's a good one, lovely & drifting, definitely the best songs on the album

"the loudest sound" is lovely too, maybe feels the most like disintegration despite the drum loop (which works well!)

"maybe someday" feels so un-cure somehow, it's like their version of an oasis song?

i really have no idea how anyone let "watching me fall" be 11 minutes, nothing about it is justified

Was so disappointed in this LP - Out Of This World was on an Uncut (or something) cover CD a fair while before the album came out - and based on that I had really high hopes for the album.

But when I finally got it (and accepted that yeah, that actually was the cover art) - it was a real slog.

Yeah is hard to tell what they were going for with Watching Me Fall - it is such a plod. From memory it was marginally better live, ebbed and flowed a bit more.

Probably the lyrics were the biggest disappointment? When in recent interviews RS has said he stopped writing because he didn't have much to write about, this album really springs to mind.

I think the title track is pretty good even though I don't really know what it's about - and "he said/you said/she said/I said" should have been retired after Plainsong.

i'm just assuming they were going for be here now with "watching me fall"

I recently saw someone on another forum describe it as "Be Here Now but on valium instead of cocaine"

If it were possible I would set "Where the Birds Always Sing" on fire and dance around it pointing and laughing as it burned to a crisp.

this is a good song!

the lyric is goofy but it's good yeah, i came to terms with this recently

love this record despite its obvious shortcomings. my first cure record

SUNDAY AFTERNOON THOUGHTS: 20 APRIL 2025 1:27 LST

i love last songs. i’ve always loved last songs. one of the main things that drew me to the cure in the first place was that they really seemed to understand the idea of how important “THE LAST SONG” can be. i mean just look at how robert smith made a ceremony over the years out of this next one being the band's last album. as an invested listener, the last song on every album that you've heard since disintegration is possibly the last song they'll ever do. it reached a point by the time bloodflowers came out, he just decided to say, “well, here's a whole album of last songs because this is definitely going to be our last album. definitely.”

and as i revisit bloodflowers this afternoon, i have to kind of chuckle at the reputation the album has in retrospect: catering to the fans of a specific fan-favorite sound. and i was definitely being catered to as a listener, but just not in the way that most other fans were. i'm more than happy to sit through an entire album of ‘last songs’ by anybody, but the fact that one of my all-time favorite bands did one of these albums is a thing to love and admire.

is it their best album? nope. is it in their top five albums? mmm, no. probably not. does it exemplify a sound and a style that is consistently cited as one of their strengths? uhm, yeah actually. like, it couldn't be more present. but i guess that's where some people started to criticize it: for being too much of that one ingredient. and i have to agree partially because “watching me fall” is still an unpleasant slog. it's only one track, sure. but being second in the sequence and taking up more than 10% of the album's runtime makes a poor impression on me, even within a nostalgic revisit. they cut “spilt milk” for this. sigh.

besides the regrettable absence of pearl thompson, the band is as beautiful as ever in their technicolor, roger o'donnell-enhanced best. with all of the extra controversy about the way the new album was recorded+mixed, it's kind of jarring to revisit bloodflowers now because it has that pre-streaming turn-of-the-century radio-ready modern rock mix: highly compressed, but still wonderfully dynamic eboigh to where the bass can rise up and steal your heart at any moment. say what you will about jason. i think he's competent and an unfortunately easy scapegoat. we can talk about that some other time. he serves these songs very well.

so of all the last songs on bloodflowers, which one captures the best articulation of ‘lastness’? i’ve listened to it a lot, and the tour was one of their most bootleged, so 50% of this album is pretty much band classics for me. robert smith's chorus'n'delay six string lays out some of his most memorable themes on “maybe someday” and “out of this world”, while i find the emotional whimsy on “there is no if” to be one of his most confusingly resonate moments. is it cheesy? should there be pop songs about sneezing? i like the song, so no answers here. the title track remains one of their best songs, full stop. i don't care where you're from or how you discovered the cure or your history with the band. if you're into the cure, that's one of your favorite songs by them. if you know, you know. forever riff.

besides “spilt milk”, there were some extras from the album: “possession” is okay for one of their dark technogoth things, while “coming up” is more “never enough” pastiche, but slowed down for postgrunge ears. the real winner was the o*kenfold remix of “out of this world” where the drums get chunked up and the woozy trem riff repeats into motorik territory. appropriayely, that's a good one to drop as the last song in dj sets btw.

bloodflowers wasn't their last album and the last song on the album wasn't even technically the last song on the album if you have specific import versions. it figures that this band would do something as theatric as this and then go on to do the trilogy, make such a big deal out of that… and then come back a few years later with a self-titled album and try to repeat it all again. now that the dust has settled on their most recent album after such a preceding long hiatus, i have to ask if bloodflowers really merited all the backlash that it's received. it was rs giving his fans what he thought they wanted. that time, they didn’t. seems like, with the reception the new album has gotten, the majority of listeners were ready to hear an album of last songs this time, whether or not that's how the band thinks of them anymore.

good album. legacy builder. four mics.

oh yeah, the poll predates my ilxorship but i'd probably have committed to my status as a walking cheesecake and went strategically for "there is no if." it's a strange song. nothing that presents itself that way should be so evocative. songs that begin with the word 'remember' are sorta instant winners back where i'm from.

catering to the fans of a specific fan-favorite sound

it isn't really though - it's what smith said he was doing but it doesn't really resemble either disintegration or pornography very much. a fair bit of it does sound like oasis of all things though. songs of a lost world is far more directly an attempt to return to the sound of disintegration than this was.

IMO the most Disintegration-ish song they’ve released post-Disintegration is “Out of this World”

Had such high hopes for this one but I think this ranks today as one of my least faves by them. Might even choose WMS over it. I still like the Loudest Sound and the title track conjures pretty well the Pornography sound (but then RS proceeds to spoil it all by shouting all over the end of the song)