Few stage props have served a band as well as the oversized chunk of railroad track that rose behind the Cure at the Spectrum on Wednesday. The twisted, broken hulk suggested the contrary turns that Robert Smith has led his group through, and also hinted at the winding course the Cure has charted over its 19-year career. During the 2 1/2-hour show, the band swept through about 30 songs that ran the gamut from merry to melancholy and stretched chronologically from its early singles to its latest album, Wild Mood Swings. Despite the dance-inspiring melodies, Smith rarely stepped from the microphone. He by no means moped - although the adoring crowd likely would have been happy no matter what Smith did. (The show was the band's first local appearance in four years.) He simply devoted his energy to being a professional musician rather than a carefree entertainer. But while this latest Cure line-up offered the audience superior sound, it was unable to maintain the momentum established early on with the one-two punch of ``Mint Car'' and ``Just Like Heaven.'' Wild Mood Swings suffers from a similar loss of momentum, and considering that a third of Wednesday's show was drawn from that album, it's not surprising that the set fell into a deep lull before the encores. The band regained its footing, however, and returned to the stage three times for crowd favorites such as ``Friday I'm In Love,'' ``Boys Don't Cry'' and ``Why Can't I Be You.''
Robert Smith, the brooding, black-eyeshadowed, synth-pop new wave existentialist at the helm of The Cure , has come to accept the role of rock star. From the directive to "speak louder and more clearly" that he admitted over the PA at the band's recent gig at the CoreStates Spectrum in Philadelphia, to the exquisitely fan-friendly and sensible pacing of the set list, a Cure concert now stands as a how-to for aging, post-punk new wave rockers, the next generation of musicians to lurch into middle age kicking and screaming, or moping and groping, as the case may be. On the July 10, Philadelphia stop on their world tour (which continues in Europe well into December), the Cure offered up a textbook mix of new songs and old favorites, interspersing old and new, crowd favorites with band favorites, danceable pop blasts with their more moody, gloomy music-to-slit-your-wrists-by. Now in his second decade at the helm of the Cure, amid ever-changing shifts in line-up, rumors of break-ups, luke-warm critical notices for their new album, Robert Smith has accepted his status as a rock and roll demigod. Smith and the Cure gave the people what they wanted, and they were grateful. Opening with the suitably brooding "Want," here embellished with sounds like sea gull cries from keyboardist Roger O'Donnell, crisp cymbal crashes from drummer Jason Cooper, and trebly, almost purposely-abrasive guitars from Smith and Perry Bamonte, the band launched into a series of material from Wild Mood Swings , including a humor-tinged take on the scathing, wah-wah-driven "Club America," the dirge-like "This Is A Lie." Some thirty songs and two and a half hours later, a copious sampling of Wild Mood Swings was made to seem of a part with such essential Cure material as found on Wish , Disintegration , Head On The Door and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. "Thanks for staying with us through the years," Smith said in the midst of a stretch of new songs, and he had it right: the audience was packed with Goth girls and boys dressed in black, hair died an even deeper black than their eye shadow and lipstick. Anthems to depression and decay were greeted with the same enthusiasm as were the dance-pop hits, and some of the loudest cheers went up for vintage mope classics like "Prayers for Rain" and the show-closing "Disintegration," in which a rock-solid bass line snaked around air raid siren sounds and chirping noises. Despite the somewhat muddy presentation, an ancient chestnut like "Charlotte Sometimes," which just about splits the difference between the two extremes,left no one sitting down. On their latest album, Wild Mood Swings, the band employs guitars, a brass section , even a string quartet. The Cure has always been at their best when most direct -- a tightly-woven, hooky drum pattern and bass line bubbling under lead signer Robert Smith's definitive mope-rock vocalisms were all it took for the Cure to be compelling, even great. Even in concert, the Cure was at its most succinct and exciting when some of the instrumentation was stripped away. Save for a few ringing, terse, surf-guitar-on-Percodan guitar solos, Smith's first-position guitar strumming was little more than clutter. When he put the guitar aside, the band was noticeably more dynamic and tight. It also freed Smith to concentrate on his singing, which was serviceable throughout, but compelling and even exciting when he wasn't strumming his guitar. O'Donnell's attempt to replicate the horn sound on "Numb" was ill-advised, sounding more like the screech of an impending car wreck than a punchy horn section. There were moments that the band succeeded as a guitar band: Smith's ringing guitar noodles and bassist Simon Gallup's three-note riff dovetailed perfectly with O'Donnell's 20-second synth wails on "Prayers For Rain," and Bamonte's underwater guitar warbles on "From The Edge Of The Deep Green Sea" provided a suitably weighty atmosphere as the band rocked hard and furiously. Among the new material, the best moment of the night came on "Strange Attraction," not because it sounds most like the "old" Cure (which it does), but because it best capitalizes on Smith's rare talent to write and sing melodies that follow the rise and fall of speaking cadences. This is Smith's genius as a songwriter, a talent long considered a hallmark of the great standard writers. If it's unlikely that we'll see a gown-draped cabaret singer "interpreting" Cure songs anytime soon, we'll just have to count on Smith and crew to do it themselves. "Strange Attraction" even sounds like it could be an outtake from an album by the hip-hopper Speech , whose very name suggests a similar bent. As a singer, Smith strains to cover what is finally a sizable range, and his rather limited, if well-pitched, vocal technique is mitigated by his patented mix of pathos and ironic, existential distance. Smith has the pipes to carry the entire show, and sounds as good now as he ever has. So when's the Unplugged set due? The Cure offered two encores, the first a giddy and only occasionally perfunctory run-through of some of their best three-minute pop songs, including "Friday I'm In Love," a somewhat muted "Boys Don't Cry," "Close To Me," and a punchy "Why Can't I Be You?" The second encore was almost a mini-set, positioning "Strange Day" as echoey, nearly ambient, while "Play For Today" sounded like a swing band gone hardcore, and the fade-out of "10:15 Saturday Night" provided late night drama. Call it what you will, synth-pop, mope rock, the Cure; it's still one of England's greatest musical creations. And after a night of basically faithful renditions of the single and album songs from across their career, Smith took everyone back to the beginning with "Killing An Arab," the Camus tribute that positioned the Cure as the literate, discerning depressive's fave. Seemingly in keeping with Smith's late and not-so-ironic embrace of "le decadence" of rock culture, the song came off not as the stark, existentialist drama of every 20th Century lit reading list soundtrack, but a roiling, psychedelic rave-up. Smith knows it's not 1978 anymore; would that everyone else could follow his lead.