With all due respect, I disagree. With “Alone,” a new song set to appear on the band’s next album, Smith gently conveys the feeling of being alone in a crowd right from the start. If the audience started out timid about an unknown path, the second song, the tender “Pictures of You,” was already turning into a chorus that accelerated Primavera Sound to its best moment.
From there, The Cure shocked audiences with pop gems “Push,” “In Between Days” and “Just Like Heaven,” taking a journey through their dark origins with a trio of songs from 1980’s Seventeen Seconds (“At Night “, “Play for Today” and “A Forest”) and expressed his poetic streak in the beautiful “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea”.
In total there were 29 songs in a two and a half hour show without any misery. Disintegration, the 1989 masterpiece that became one of pop music’s most unlikely hits, contains six songs, including “Lullaby,” a gem that turns the narrative into a musical nightmare, and the sublime “Plainsong,” which ends the first The title song of the album anticipates the encore.
By this point, the audience, including new fans and old enthusiasts (oops!), have already surrendered, and not even the exhaustion compounded by the heat ravaging São Paulo can dampen their enthusiasm for the seemingly endless set. The coup de grace comes in the second encore, as Smith leads the band in another charttopping run that ranges from the strange “The Walk” to “Friday I’m in Love” (probably the most uplifting song in history) and a final section with “Close to Me” (the brass section is missing live) and “Why Can’t I Be You?”
The Cure came full circle when they signed off with “Boys Don’t Cry,” which opened the band to the world in 1979. The story of the boy who lost his love out of pure pride sums up the band’s journey well materializing a timeless melancholy. However, in the 21st century, labels postpunk, gothic, new wave, metal, grunge are used to organize a playlist, but they refer to nostalgia rather than a state of mind. Finally, The Cure brought a smile to the faces of everyone in Primavera Sound with their aura of damn romantics. Who would say that!