When one of my friends asked me to rate The Cure's new album, "Songs of a Lost World," in comparison to the rest of their catalogue, it seemed like a simple enough question and I almost flippantly answered it on the spot. After a moment of thinking about it however I realized that doing the topic justice would require not only sorting through over forty years of music history, but even defining "what is a Cure album" in the first place; and in that instant, the project I'm sharing here was born.