CD reviews: The Cure, Snow Patrol

The Cure, "4:13" (Suretone/Geffen)

There's wah-wah all over the place on the Cure's 13th studio album. Through a 30-year recording career, Robert Smith has led the Cure through various recurring modes. Behind his slurred, quavery, perpetually nervous yelp, the Cure has put across stripped-down new wave; brooding, synthesizer-dominated dirges; crisp pop; electronics-dominated dance music; vigorously strummed folk-rock, and splashy, distorted quasi-psychedelic rock. The new album is one of the splashy ones, with up-tempo songs awash in guitar reverb and cymbal whooshes, akin to albums such as "Wish" (1992) and parts of "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" (1987) and "Wild Mood Swings" (1996). The territory is familiar -- occasionally too familiar.

The upbeat songs don't mean that Smith, one of rock's most articulate mopers, has gotten all happy. The CD includes two love songs in which, amazingly enough, things are working out euphorically: "The Only One" and "This. Here and Now. With You."

But it's not like the Cure to settle into lasting contentment, and the rest of "4:13 Dream" is filled with upheavals. As the band churns ahead, Smith blurts lyrics about insecurity ("Sirensong"), disorientation ("Freakshow"), infidelity ("The Real Snow White") and bitterness about materialism ("The Hungry Ghost"). In "Switch" Smith returns to his lifelong alienation as Porl Thompson's guitar scrapes and chatters. On this hyperactive Cure album there's barely any gap between exultation and desperate flailing.

JON PARELES, NEW YORK TIMES

Snow Patrol, "A Hundred Million Suns"

(Interscope)

It's not the sole reason to buy the album. In fact, there's not much to steer clear of on this disc, other than midway through where frontman Gary Lightbody and company fall into a sleepy mode with songs such as "Set Down Your Glass" and the slow-building but evocative "The Planets Bend Between Us."

They're far better on the crackling and explosive "If There's a Rocket Tie Me to It," the Belfast-inspired "Take Back the City," with its busted-up guitar solo, or the wild "Please Just Take These Photos From My Hands."