Opening a box labelled “bad ideas and worse sounds” is a bold start to any album. But leftovers need using, and The Cure frontman Robert Smith decides the time to dump all those scraps out is here. Wild Mood Swings is, as its title would suggest, wildly swinging in search of a worthy sound to follow on from Wish. Smith and the band don’t manage it. They would have to wait for Bloodflowers for that, but at least he got the intense love of brass out of his system. An hour-long emptying of poor ideas. Blur them together well enough, and you can pull some passable songs from Wild Mood Swings. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally, the wilder moods will swing into action and provide a song worthy of The Cure. It’s a frustrating hour. Wild Mood Swings has some brilliant moments to it but either the production or lyrics get in the way of what should be magnificent songs.
One or the other is the problem for Wild Mood Swings, and beyond opener Want, it’s hard to hear what the band were trying to create. Club America is a messy second song, though there is plenty to enjoy with its messy, energetic rock. Erratic theme is the main trouble for Wild Mood Swings. It’s a not-so-subtle move from the rocked-out Club Americana to the splendour of This is a Lie. With a bridge between them, it would have made sense, but Wild Mood Swings feels like a loose collection of singles at the best of times. But come around to this manic way of thinking Smith deploys here and there are moments which, while not memorable, are interesting. A song like The 13th changes the purpose of the band. Light dance music, soft salsa adaptations from The Cure. They do everything they can to shed their gothic image and succeed through brute force.
Wild Mood Swings may have a lighter style to it, but it still has some golden moments. Smith still sounds great, a voice which has barely changed over his decades fronting The Cure. Their instrumentals are looser, a playful feeling which affected the band during their new wave genre-chasing days. It’s a mess of different ideas, but Smith and the band are strong enough at this point to hold it all together. There’s a lighter pop expectation following Wish, which they lean into, but by his own admission, Smith struggles with writing lighter material. Wild Mood Swings suffers from that, but it never becomes a major problem. It remains an enjoyable deep cut selection, songs which could have used a little more instrumental focus. With that comes less variety, though, and this album is very much a place for experimentation.
Good on The Cure for offering variety when they could have relied on old tones. A piece like Gone is a break from the norm, and yet the return to painful lyrics and pangs of heartbreak on Numb is the band at their best on Wild Mood Swings. Artists should be encouraged to offer alternatives to their usual sound, but when nothing sounds better than those tones which still define them, it is fair to let them trudge back to it. They tried, they did not quite succeed, and the results are at least an interesting stop-off. Wild Mood Swings is a reminder of The Cure as a band of multitudes, something lost in their grey and gloomy aesthetic of late. Hate for the expectations of those around him is what Smith gets to on Trap, and it forms the core of Wild Mood Swings. It’s the back and forth he doesn’t quite embody, that messy spirit found in the album’s title, is not as volatile as it should be.
