Closing on a 30-year backlog of ideas, it's no surprise to find Robert Smith repeating himself, but where that dearth of daring damned his last few records, The Cure marks the first time in ages that the music has measured up. Invoking Disintegration is ridiculous, but The Cure is remarkably more thrilling a listen than the band's most recent guitar-heavy predecessors, the uneven Bloodflowers and 1992's often prosaic Wish.

Today's crop of budding pop music critics is fucked to deal with The Cure. The tragically ignorant will repeat tired one-liners and make embarrassing second-hand observations (Laura Sinagra in The New York Times), or opt out with flippant nonchalance (see Rob Sheffield's Rolling Stone review), glossing over the fact that The Cure could be the most important pop act of the last 20 years. The far more troubling and likely scenario-- mine-- is that Robert Smith's songs scored our halcyon teenage romances, prompting us to say things like, "The Cure could be the most important pop act of the last 20 years."

Judging from "Lost" and "Labyrinth", I'd guess Ross Robinson's first fumblings happened underneath Cure posters, too. I'm not getting near the new-age, band-building tactics Robinson pulled in the studio (Roger O'Donnell almost walked out), but the unhinged screams he culled from Smith made it worthwhile; from a fan's perspective, these wails come straight from "All I Have to Do Is Kill Her", an improvised meltdown from the brutal 14 Explicit Moments tour in support of 1982's Pornography. It's a welcome rawness not captured on record since "The Kiss", an intensity Smith failed to recreate on Bloodflowers' bloated it's-so-hard-to-be-a-rock-star bore "Watching Me Fall". Though it's irksome that the lyrics to "Labyrinth" are stylistically just a rewrite of "Watching Me Fall", the music is far sharper, a swirling psychedelic update of The Cure's 1994 breakup bow-out "Burn".

"Lost" is a fitting opener, picking up where Wish "End"-ed. Smith shrieks, "I can't find myself," with a rage unheard since the 1989 Prayer Tour, when he dabbled in primal scream therapy during "Prayers for Rain". The song's morbid guitar melodies reach back to Pornography-- a pastime of which Smith's been fond in recent years-- but what's really lost here are the stark lead lines that drove those early catharses, drowned out by muddily compressed guitar and flange. Apart from the putrid terrorism PSA "Us or Them", the album survives its moments of overdone overdrive, but even its best tracks are starved for a stellar riff, which is hard to reconcile considering "Fascination Street" alone had, what, ten?

Worse, the half-baked identity crisis Smith's been on about for the last 10 years continues. Robert Smith is beyond-happily married, enjoys a social and economic standing you cannot imagine, and more importantly, has been doing whatever he wants for decades. You can say success has spoiled him and be done with it, but Smith used to write about his feelings, and even when he acted out-- with the awesomely awful "Let's Go to Bed", with "Why Can't I Be You?" and "Never Enough"-- it came from a willful, decadent core. Since Wild Mood Swings, however, he's been second-guessing himself, a zombie writing and behaving as we expect him to. For whatever reason, the man refuses to alter the least important aspect of a most important career-- the fucking makeup-- and has actually regressed into writing dumber lyrics designed to be "dreamy." Lines like, "Maybe we didn't understand/ Not just a boy and a girl/ It's just the end of the world," lend a whole new gravity to "Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip."

Stasis bitching aside, The Cure hides some delicious treats for fans and initiates alike. Perhaps the finest piece of music on the record, "(I Don't Know What's Going) On", suffers the brunt of the backdated teen dreaming, hanging heavy on the gushing refrain, "I am so in love with you," but the summery "Before Three" is positively beaming, overflowing with familiar chorused delay and Smith's signature whinny. Brushing up against those lauded flipsides from 1992's High EP, "Before Three" lobs a lamentably oafish curse in its chorus ("So fucked and high!"), but it can't upstage the happy satisfaction of a good Cure song, such a rare commodity these days. And while the aforementioned chorus may be atrocious, "The End of the World" is an evilly catchy single; if you haven't already, you'll get it stuck in your head on one listen, which in some circles is what pop music is all about, but it's not the sort of compliment I'd ever expect to pay The Cure. "Doo doo-doo doo," you say?