Great conversation this!! Loving it. I genuinely reckon SOE is the first album where I'm always hitting skip. Those three songs are the bottom three with daylight fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh.
I was genuinely surprised to come in here and see people shitting all over it. The cringiness over that line is valid, but I mean hey we all love Bono and his ATM machine in MOS...
I don't know why anyone has an issue with that line. Literally everyone in the world says ATM machine in real life, as they do PIN number.
The stretch of Best Thing/Get Out/American Soul is even worse than the middle of NLOTH, only there's nothing nearly as good as that album's highs to bail it out.
Hear hear, although I will return to SOE before I ever do SOI, because it's got a bunch of good songs and it's really easy to skip through those three.
Crazy Tonight is a more effective pop song than Best Thing or Get Out and American Soul has many of the same problems as SUC, being a lame rocker with a stilted arrangement
Basically, I'm saying I agree with Cobbler. Which is a precarious position to be in, I know.
I've always, always liked Crazy Tonight. It has a bit to do with nostalgia, I was still in U2 mode around then. Listening right now, the verses are pretty atrocious, some fun lines but Bono's singing sucks, but I will go in to bat for the chorus for all eternity. It feels effortless to me. The live version was also fucking terrific, though it was completely different.
I’m surprised that The Refugee and Red Light aren’t getting more hate. Those are 2 pretty cringeworthy tracks that I think are forgiven because they’re on the War album.
Red Light is a masterpiece compared to Grace and SFS.
The Refugee isn't good, but its not bottom 5 material.
i like red light quite a bit once you get past the "da-da-da" intro.
the refugee doesn't fit in with the rest of the album it's on and i'll probably skip it if i'm listening to war all the way through, but it's not nigh-unlistenable like the NLOTH/SOE clunkers we've been talking about.
This is how I feel. The Refugee isn't good, but it's not horrible, and I like the bridge (?) part that comes after the drum part. As for Red Light... I think it's fucking fantastic. The intro is obviously awful, but I love Edge's angular guitar playing, the horn flourishes, and the chorus is great.
i'm also pleasantly surprised that nobody has mentioned miami yet. it gets a lot of undeserved hate from interference, though that may be more of a "the other place" opinion than a shuttlecock opinion.
Miami is fucking fantastic and anyone who doesn't like it is an idiot.
Never got this either. Yeah the lyrics are creepy if you wanna read into them like that. I just listen to it as a dumb little love song. I think it's great.
The Hands That Built America
Thank you for this Tourist!! I'd forgotten about this. Terrible, terrible song and definitely in my bottom 10.
Can I throw Original of the Species out there as a bottom five candidate? It might be the definition of mawkish.
Again, nostalgia colours my opinion too much here. It's bad, objectively, but Hutdab was my first U2 album, and I
adore the "everywhereeeee you go" part with Edge's soaring guitar.
) but it was still cool to hear it reborn. To be there in person to hear one of their all-time best songs, in tact until the chorus, after Bad, was something pretty special.
