On a non-political note, one of the greatest bands in the world releases a new album today

Yay hyperbole! Though sorry about the small image size:

Gave a listen to the Cure‘s 4:13 Dream last night for the first time — as I’ll be writing about it for an upcoming issue of Plan B, I’ll just say that I was pleasantly surprised. Not that I was thinking it would be a bad album, but instead of it being simply okay, say, it was quite stellar — it helped that the singles, which tended to sound all right enough individually (though “Freakshow” is flat-out great), actually worked better heard in the flow of the album itself. Starting and ending on the strong notes of “Underneath the Stars” and “It’s Over” didn’t hurt!

So yeah, snag this here. Meantime the Quietus has got a couple of fun pieces up worth checking out:

John Doran’s negative review (always good to get different opinions, and John’s a Cure fan of long standing)

John creates a Cure mixtape, with explanations