Now that we've heard the clip...

[HansaTonImbiss]

Sorry, my initial reply was rather uncharitable - I will post my thoughts below.

I find it rather underwhelming so far. The guitar seems a bit "samey", but Bono's vocals seem technically pretty good. I hope he uses some lower register on this album though.

It makes me think of Achtung Baby & HTDAAB having a child. The song it reminds me most of is UTEOTW to be honest, though that might just be the guitar.

I was really hoping Edge would use some different guitar tones on this album, but if this song is any indication it seems straight from the HTDAAB play book.

I'll speak from a general standpoint, including what was heard in the Fez sessions in addition to the clip, and give my thoughts.

I think Bono is undoubtedly experimenting more with the range and pitch of his voice than he has in the past two albums. That, in my opinion, is a good sign.

The guitar parts also harken back to AB/Zooropa-era type cuts in a slight way, in that they are harder and darker than what was previously heard in ATYCLB/HTDAAB. But more than anything, I think the riffs thus far sound a little like things that would have been alternate cuts to what was heard on "Pop".

Too garbled and raw to hear much from bass/drums, but we'll see. The one element I think everyone is discounting is the amount of influence engineering and production will have on this album. Any weight that an "atmospheric" or "Moroccan" feel may have hinges on production and engineering. I hope that Flood has a big part in this (in terms of mixing and editing), and that U2 avoids making any allowances for a pop audience in diluting their sound.

So far, though, I'm a little encouraged by what I hear. I stopped playing HTDAAB after the first month or so I had it, and I'm a die hard fan.

 

[gherman]

Song

Considering the history of Interefence I hope eveyone HATES the clips because then later on when the album is out everyone will love the it

 

[TheBrazilianFly]

I can't make much out of what I heard. What I could feel from the song is that it seemed too soft and like something U2 could write at any moment. Hopefuly I didn't hear it too well or it will be a b-side for a single. But it didn't sounded interesting, lively, new, exciting or anything good to be completely honest. And Bono was singing with that soft little boy voice that I'm starting to dislike quite a lot. He's almost 50, one thing is to sound sweet and emotionally open and another thing is to sound weak and boring like that. Sorry if I'm being too honest here.

 

[HansaTonImbiss]

I can't make much out of what I heard. What I could feel from the song is that it seemed too soft and like something U2 could write at any moment. Hopefuly I didn't hear it too well or it will be a b-side for a single. But it didn't sounded interesting, lively, new, esciting or anything good to be completely honest. And Bono was singing with that soft little boy voice that I'm starting to dislike quite a lot. He's almost 50, one thing is to sound sweet and emotionally open and another thing is to sound weak and boring like that. Sorry if I'm being too honest here

What did you think of the Fez cuts?

 

[Utoo]

What did you think of the Fez cuts?

Where have you heard Fez cuts? Are you talking about the Lanois movie?

 

[Varitek]

That post really is freaking hilarious! Are we all gonna sound like that when the new album leaks?

Yes, probably.

 

[veber]

You can't tell anything from the clip. But you can tell quite a bit about people who think they can.

 

[popacrobat]

You can't tell anything from the clip.

 

[ndmaxfield]

I'll speak from a general standpoint, including what was heard in the Fez sessions in addition to the clip, and give my thoughts.

I think Bono is undoubtedly experimenting more with the range and pitch of his voice than he has in the past two albums. That, in my opinion, is a good sign.

The guitar parts also harken back to AB/Zooropa-era type cuts in a slight way, in that they are harder and darker than what was previously heard in ATYCLB/HTDAAB. But more than anything, I think the riffs thus far sound a little like things that would have been alternate cuts to what was heard on "Pop".

Too garbled and raw to hear much from bass/drums, but we'll see. The one element I think everyone is discounting is the amount of influence engineering and production will have on this album. Any weight that an "atmospheric" or "Moroccan" feel may have hinges on production and engineering. I hope that Flood has a big part in this (in terms of mixing and editing), and that U2 avoids making any allowances for a pop audience in diluting their sound.

So far, though, I'm a little encouraged by what I hear. I stopped playing HTDAAB after the first month or so I had it, and I'm a die hard fan.

Now that you mention it, I'm actually thinking a little post-Pop to "Ground Beneath Her Feet" - this new clip has some of the same elements (a little bit slower pace, Bono singing like he's confessing something).

 

[thelaj]

I think Achtung Baby probably polarised opinion, but the crucial difference is that in 1991 there was nowhere near the same exposure and type-of-hype around album launches. Sure, there were the hardcore possibly trading leaks on tape and the like - but today any Joe Schmo can download these leaks. Why does that matter?

It matters because everyone gets sucked up into this hype. Nobody wants to be the guy who says "this is shit" in case it turns out to be true. I find that strange because Interference is often a pretty negative place. New album launches and leaks just send people round the bend - witness Axver's ejaculation over HTDAAB as evidence of this. Four years between albums mean hype is increased and people are hungry for new stuff.

When WITS was heard, a lot of people said it was fantastical when to me it is a pleasant enough song, but it's no Streets! This pattern repeats itself ad-nauseum.

In financial markets, dealers often under- or over-anticipate company performance for a variety of reasons - it takes a while for the market to settle and the security to find its true price. I don't see a new album launch as any different.

I am not saying people are stupid for getting caught up in the hype, because it can be fun after-all. Some people need to accept that not all of us will be hailing this as the ultimate U2 though... waiting a bit to form opinions is no bad thing in today's culture.

I don't feel this track has U2 pushing themselves in a new direction, it seems like HTDAAB and AB in a blender to me. I am not forming a proper opinion about it though because the production and mixing and so on will seriously affect how this sounds, and I will wait until then before assessing the material.

What I will say is that Bono's voice sounds pretty good, but I hope it isn't all in the higher end of the register (a-la Bomb).

 

[LemonMelon]

I think the funniest part of that whole thread is Axver's reactions.

U2 Feedback - View Single Post - It's Here!!

how can somone rate this 3/10?

TASTELESS INSANITY. That's what.

 

[phillyfan26]

so howcome AB didn't receive this treatment?

1. The Internet wasn't the Internet as we know it. People aren't constantly talking about it on message boards.

2. Probably just because it's generally considered a better album than HTDAAB more than anything.

3. If you ask me personally, Achtung Baby is very overrated. It's an album with some good songs that was terribly produced and poorly ordered, with some questionable choices of album tracks vs. B-sides.

 

[KhanadaRhodes]

could we please stay on topic? thanks.

 

[LemonMelon]

so howcome AB didn't receive this treatment?

It did. There are old yahoo groups from the early days of the internet with posts that bash the album. It's just aged pretty well over the years, and most got used to it.

Bomb will probably get some respect 5-10 years from now, once everyone is tired of Solar or whatever.

Now, on a more on-topic note, I can't make out much at all from that clip. Sad, but true. Not sure if there's much can be discussed here...it's just a bunch of street noise with Bono occasionally becoming audible.

 

[Zoo_Fly]

I like the clip... but...














It's no Mercy


couldn't resist

/Mercy talk

 

[DreamOutLoud13]

The real pitiful thing is that the loudest car comes by right after Edge starts his solo

And to anyone that can't hear anything... basically, this is what I did: I opened the clip in Audacity (a free, simple audio editing program) and selected the noisy car parts, then lowered the volume on them (go to effects > amplify, and drag the thing into negative numbers) then I selected the whole thing and raised the volume (amplify again, but positive numbers this time). That way, it was all louder, except the car parts (otherwise they'd bust your ears) and then strain to hear it.

I'm not gonna say "OMG this is the best thing since One!" or anything, because honestly it's too soon to tell, and 402 is still my favourite beach clip anyway. But I do like how it sounds. It's not cheesy or sugary or chimey, like some U2 songs that shall remain nameless... it's got a good beat and the guitar sounds a bit raw and gritty. And Bono's voice sounds strong, say it with me folks:

"Ariiiiiiiiiiiiiiise, and I am going to the surface of your loooooove!"

 

[onyourkneesboy]

IMO if U2 wants this new album to even compete with AB or even outsmart it, they really have to make the songs "fly" and "bounce"..

The reason why AB sounds so diverse, multi-layered and therefore timeless, is because the whole team (U2, Lanois, Eno, Flood, etc..) used a lot of reverb to create this enourmous SPACE. This, mixed with a lot of percussion created a "strange brew" that really worked. Listen how much really noticable percussion there is on AB compared with HTDAAB...
IMO Bono's voice and Edge's guitar sound really benefit from some great amount of reverb.

When you listen to songs like: Zoo Station (this "spooky-abandonded-factory" sound), UTEOTW, Wild Horses, MW, Ultraviolet, Acrobat, and especially Blindness the songs suck you in or fly of with you.
Eno once called Ultraviolet "helicopter-ish". I think he's right...

Everybody here is so worried about "over-production":
You know what album was really "over-over-over-produced"?: Achtung Baby! But so fantastically well-done that it really worked. So over-production doensn't have to be the problem. If the songs are good enough and the production team has a real original approach for the songs with a new sound etc.. then one can really create a "new world" for the songs.
Listen what happened to "Take You Down" from the AB-outtakes: they crushed it, smashed it, played with it by the means of over-production and out of it came: The Fly. Almost every U2-fan I know and on this board was blown away by it! Almost to much to handle!
All these ingredients just weren't on HTDAAB... IMO they wanted to avoid over-production by all means, and wanted a more simplyfied-down-to-earth production approach. That, combined with weak songs (ABOY) and U2 imitating U2 (COBL, MD, Crumbs (Walk On-rip off!)) really made this album flat and not lasting.

So for this album I really hope for passionate song/chord structures, reverb, percussion-overload by Lanois and Larry, Larry brandmarking some songs with original drumming, weird fucked-up noises on Edge's guitar, Edge: leave the cheesy-slaaaide-guitar in the closet for once and pick up the rhythm-guitar again, ambient/spacy synths by Eno, Bono using his cool-creepy-macho low voice again (UTEOTW, Fly..) and of course Bono's great full-voice singing (that really seems in shape nowadays!)

They don't have to create a AB part 2 (although I wouldn't mind) but IMO when these ingredients are there this album really could be their best!!

 

[ndmaxfield]

The real pitiful thing is that the loudest car comes by right after Edge starts his solo

And to anyone that can't hear anything... basically, this is what I did: I opened the clip in Audacity (a free, simple audio editing program) and selected the noisy car parts, then lowered the volume on them (go to effects > amplify, and drag the thing into negative numbers) then I selected the whole thing and raised the volume (amplify again, but positive numbers this time). That way, it was all louder, except the car parts (otherwise they'd bust your ears) and then strain to hear it.

I'm not gonna say "OMG this is the best thing since One!" or anything, because honestly it's too soon to tell, and 402 is still my favourite beach clip anyway. But I do like how it sounds. It's not cheesy or sugary or chimey, like some U2 songs that shall remain nameless... it's got a good beat and the guitar sounds a bit raw and gritty. And Bono's voice sounds strong, say it with me folks:

"Ariiiiiiiiiiiiiiise, and I am going to the surface of your loooooove!"

I tried editing the clip a little more with Sony's SoundForge, but couldn't do any better than you DOL. Thanks for sharing this with everybody. You all know that if you were walking past Madison Square Garden one night, and you didn't know U2 was playing (like that would ever happen), but you heard this song faintly from the sidewalk (same quality) with cars passing, and got hit with "Ariiiiiiiiiiise", you'd be kicking yourself thinking, "What am I missing???"

 

[mgokelly]

IMO it sounds like a b-side, very hard to tell from the quality, I hope it isn't a reflection of what is going to be on the album, I'm hoping for something like the impact 'The Fly' made all those years ago. The 'Hear is What is' clips offers more hope. We need something the breaks new groung not like DTDAAB or ATYCLB.

I passed by HQ yesterday, only two people outside.

 

[ndmaxfield]

See, the thing about these clips is that with them not being straight off-the-album clips, with even the slightest background muddling, etc., there's far too much imagination involved. Yeah, sure, I'm a quasi-musician and major music fan and I can pick out a lot, too. But even still, no matter what any one thinks he or she picks out of this clip or the others, the final piece--when played alone, crisply off the album as if in a vacuum--is going to sound a lot different than what you got out of these beach/hq clips.

It's just like the HTDAAB beach clips. People who heard them before the album came out claim that the beachclip versions are much better than the album versions. I got the clips after I'd already heard the album. To me, the songs on the beach clips sound a hell of a lot like the album versions. There's a lot of imagination and emotion involved in interpreting leaked bootleg clips.

That is what's fun about this type of thing for me. I know this is something new from my favorite band, it's halfway inaudible, yet I can (try to) interpret it based on my familiarity with the band's catalogue. I'm a speech-language researcher, and one thing I study in my lab is how people perceive speech in noise, so this stuff fascinates me. You'd be surprised at how well the brain does filling-in missing information. Imagine if this clip never showed up on any album, and what we've been hearing is a glimpse of U2 mid-creation (and this is the only way we might ever get to hear anything like this, short of sneaking in to their studio). What you get is what you get from the sidewalk outside (and what you make of it).

 

[Visiongfx]

I still think the first few lines are this:


"All of this you, Will not forget, our Life" (can't tell) then "Liiiiiiiiiiiiiife!"

To me this sounds better than a B-side... Of course if U2 is taking the same course as bomb then the b-sides will be better than the album

 

[mgokelly]

IMO if U2 wants this new album to even compete with AB or even outsmart it, they really have to make the songs "fly" and "bounce"..

The reason why AB sounds so diverse, multi-layered and therefore timeless, is because the whole team (U2, Lanois, Eno, Flood, etc..) used a lot of reverb to create this enourmous SPACE. This, mixed with a lot of percussion created a "strange brew" that really worked. Listen how much really noticable percussion there is on AB compared with HTDAAB...
IMO Bono's voice and Edge's guitar sound really benefit from some great amount of reverb.

When you listen to songs like: Zoo Station (this "spooky-abandonded-factory" sound), UTEOTW, Wild Horses, MW, Ultraviolet, Acrobat, and especially Blindness the songs suck you in or fly of with you.
Eno once called Ultraviolet "helicopter-ish". I think he's right...

Everybody here is so worried about "over-production":
You know what album was really "over-over-over-produced"?: Achtung Baby! But so fantastically well-done that it really worked. So over-production doensn't have to be the problem. If the songs are good enough and the production team has a real original approach for the songs with a new sound etc.. then one can really create a "new world" for the songs.
Listen what happened to "Take You Down" from the AB-outtakes: they crushed it, smashed it, played with it by the means of over-production and out of it came: The Fly. Almost every U2-fan I know and on this board was blown away by it! Almost to much to handle!
All these ingredients just weren't on HTDAAB... IMO they wanted to avoid over-production by all means, and wanted a more simplyfied-down-to-earth production approach. That, combined with weak songs (ABOY) and U2 imitating U2 (COBL, MD, Crumbs (Walk On-rip off!)) really made this album flat and not lasting.

So for this album I really hope for passionate song/chord structures, reverb, percussion-overload by Lanois and Larry, Larry brandmarking some songs with original drumming, weird fucked-up noises on Edge's guitar, Edge: leave the cheesy-slaaaide-guitar in the closet for once and pick up the rhythm-guitar again, ambient/spacy synths by Eno, Bono using his cool-creepy-macho low voice again (UTEOTW, Fly..) and of course Bono's great full-voice singing (that really seems in shape nowadays!)

They don't have to create a AB part 2 (although I wouldn't mind) but IMO when these ingredients are there this album really could be their best!!

Well written, I agree with a lot of this, do you have a copy of the AB out takes?

 

[onyourkneesboy]

Well written, I agree with a lot of this, do you have a copy of the AB out takes?

I do actually. But it's on 4 or 5 cd's...

I even have it on vinyl..

 

[U2girl]

AB was a polarising album upon release. I think the last two albums just get more critisized because of the 90's bias on the internet population of the U2 fandom. And there were posters bashing Bomb and All that... upon release.

That clip ? Not enough clarity to tell anything other than it's a U2 song. This time, more than anything, I'd like an album as opposed to song collections we've been getting since Zooropa (and AB), and I would like something that isn't borrowing from neither 80's, 90's or 00's U2. Hopefully Bono and Edge are inspired enough so they can give us that, and not worry too much whether it's better than JT or AB. I'll settle for something that will beat post AB output.

 

[onyourkneesboy]

AB was a polarising album upon release. I think the last two albums just get more critisized because of the 90's bias on the internet population of the U2 fandom. And there were posters bashing Bomb and All that... upon release.

That clip ? Not enough clarity to tell anything other than it's a U2 song. This time, more than anything, I'd like an album as opposed to song collections we've been getting since Zooropa (and AB), and I would like something that isn't borrowing from neither 80's, 90's or 00's U2. Hopefully Bono and Edge are inspired enough so they can give us that, and not worry too much whether it's better than JT or AB. I'll settle for something that will beat post AB output.

I agree. It sounds good but it's not totally surprising...
Can you imagine if AB and Zooropa were never released and we got a sqreetchy bad HQ-clip right now of, let's say: Lemon, The Fly, The Wanderer, Mofo, Your Blue Room, or even Stateless... Then we all could say: "wow, is this U2? I hardly didn't recognize it"
So again: I'm very curious if they can ever be that surprising! No doubt it will again be an good album, but will it knock us off our feet by surprise or has the daring, pioneering, inventive U2 become their own tribute-band with again an album full of COBL's, MD's and a few over-dramatised ballads that all have to appeal to the big masses in the stadiums? Hope not...

 

[mgokelly]

I do actually. But it's on 4 or 5 cd's...

I even have it on vinyl..

Any chance you'd have an mp3 of the one that turned into 'The Fly'

 

[onyourkneesboy]

Any chance you'd have an mp3 of the one that turned into 'The Fly'

I'll try to send it to you this weekend.

 

[mgokelly]

I'll try to send it to you this weekend.

Fair play to ya......gotta go....gotta go....gotta go....enjoy the weekend.

 

[DreamOutLoud13]

Okay, this is basically what my head hears before/during the second chorus, 1:13-1:20 on the original clip:

And say I'm ready
Just close your eyes
I just can't stay awaaay
[indistinguishable]
Ariiiiiiiiiiise
I am going to the surface of your loooove
Up! Up! Up!


Also, the 'ariiiiiiise' bit could very well be 'aliiiiiiiive'

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

YouTube - Dump Trucks