Well, having finally gotten round to listening the album, my verdict is that this is a cracker of a record. Possibly their most immediate record ever, and in my opinion the best since Achtung.
I'm not thinking of too many negatives (for once) but if I had to think of a negative, it would probably be that some of the songs wear their influences just a bit too obviously. But U2 have always been great distillers of their idols' work - like Bowie, they have always been great mix-and-mashers or even interpreters of other peoples work (I don't intend that as a criticism, BTW.)
All the stuff that turned me off about ATYCLB and HTDAAB - the overproduction, the sluggishness - is just gone from this record. I always thought with ATYCLB/HTDAAB period, well if you want to write chart hits, fine, but in choosing your influences, pick stuff that's actually good in the first place. In my opinion, U2 were being influenced by stuff in that era - the early 00's - that wasn't really any great shakes in the first place. In this record, they have made the right choices, in my view.
In an odd way, I think of this as the record Passengers should have been. I genuinely thought that U2 were going to go supernova after the ZOOTV period and really bring rock to a new level (a cliche, I know, but I can't think of any better way of saying it). I'm not sure they've quite accomplished that with this record, but I think it is as good as anything that's out there at present, and better than most.
'Artist as shaman' is a thing I'm big on at present. It's kind of how I judge music at the moment - is this timelesss, whilst also evoking the mood of a particular time and place? Plus, also, the immediacy and the emotional fix, as it were. Radiohead, I think, have that characteristic to their music, and U2, I'm pleasantly surprised to admit, still have it.
