Shuttlecock XVIII - SAVE US, REFU-JESUS

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Then god forbid I point out the reality of the consumer and critical communities both finding that album to be a turkey and I get dog-piled for it.

Critical reaction is always subjective and thus probably shouldn't be used as some kind of evidence of the absolute value, or lack thereof, of a piece of work.
 
15 years ago yesterday, The Best Of 1990-2000 was released.

I know, probably not something this crowd would deem worth commemorating, what with the new mixes and Beautiful Day/Stuck In A Moment being included on a 90s comp, while The Fly, Lemon, and Please were all omitted.

Still, it's a Shuttlecock anniversary. It gave us Electrical Storm, anyway.




And The Hands That Built America, but most of you hate that song.
 
Crazy its been 15 years already. I remember buying it on my way to class in college.

I love(d) Electrical Storm and I was pretty high on U2's future at that point.
 
Sending my thoughts your way, U2DMfan.

Add me to the list of folks who don't ever need to hear Stuck or SYCMIOYO ever again. Agree that the "don't leave me here alone" part makes the best of an overwrought moment.
 
Treasure (What Ever Happened To Pork The Chop?)

If I had been drinking tea this morning, this one would've made my spit it out.

That chorus is abysmally adult contemporary.

This is how I feel about When I Look at the World. I CANNOT understand the love for that MOR piece of crap.

My dad died 2 weeks ago.

I'm sorry.


Should make getting tickets easier


My first thoughts. Let's hope so.
 
And The Hands That Built America, but most of you hate that song.

And now, for my second wildly uncool opinion of the day:

Hands is a good song muted by some really cheesy keyboard embellishments that would have been best left off entirely (thanks, William Orbit).

Also, the note that Bono misses by a hundred miles in the video at 2:09 always makes me laugh:



I have no clue why that was the take they went with.
 
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I've always liked Hands. I loved the way it played with the credits at the end of the movie, too.
 
The version actually in the film has that long intro with the electric guitar soloing, considerably better than what's on that atrocity of a Best Of collection and that above clip.

It's still pretty weak though. So glad they didn't win an Oscar for it.
 
And now, for my second wildly uncool opinion of the day:

Hands is a good song muted by some really cheesy keyboard embellishments that would have been best left off entirely (thanks, William Orbit).

Also, the note that Bono misses by a hundred miles in the video at 2:09 always makes me laugh:



I have no clue why that was the take they went with.


I've always liked Hands. I loved the way it played with the credits at the end of the movie, too.

I like Hands a lot too, but the prevailing opinion in these parts, in my recollection, has not been in agreement with us.

Also, I don't know about the keyboards Travis mentions, but I've always loved the strings in the 'of all of the promises/is this one we could keep/of all of the dreams/is this one still out of reach' part. And the faux operatic stuff that follows.
 
I'm getting to the point lately where I think All I Want Is You might be my favorite U2 song, or at least their best studio creation. Zooropa has my favorite ending of their career, one of the most orgasmic moments in music history, but every moment of All I Want Is You is so perfectly balanced and arranged and the production is incredible. It's very impressive that they took a song that's largely two chords and made it so engaging. It proves that simplicity can be a potent vehicle for passion and visceral intensity.

Obviously Bono is at his best here, enough ink has been spilled about his vocal and those conflicted, doubtful yet romantic lyrics, but Edge is really the hero of the song. The way he uses dynamics, with big swells of emotion and gentle, crackling distortion right when it's needed is what takes the song to the next level. I think a lot of people overlook how remarkable, well-placed and rewarding his guitar solo is. It's only a couple of notes with his traditional delay (and some white-hot gain), but like Neil Young's beloved one note guitar solo in Cinnamon Girl, it's how the notes are played and when they're played that really matters.

Also, rock bands tend to fuck up string arrangements by piling them on when they're not needed — usually with one saccharine, obvious melody — but the arrangement here is cutting and tangential, breaking off from the track into something different yet haunting and evocative of the sense of fear and doubt embedded in the song.

Ahhhh it's so good.
 
Hands is an awful song, but what I hate the most is how it was used as an intro to Pride in 2015. That was excruciating. Or, no, maybe I hate even more how it was used to neuter the end of Bullet on the Vertigo Tour.

Electrical Storm, in either Original Mix or Radio 1 leaked demo version, is one of the best post-Pop songs. I've always loved it. I wouldn't put it near my top 10 or 20 like I did when I joined this site all those years ago, but I still rate it really highly. I do not consider the William Orbit Mix to exist.

And the new mixes of Gone and Numb are superior, I don't care what any of you say. New mixes of Discotheque and SATS can get fucked though. And I'd love to know why MW has that one different lyric. Or why the UK and Japan versions got The Fly as a bonus track but Australia did not, despite getting the ATYCLB and HTDAAB bonus tracks.

This post will, no doubt, induce a fit for laz. Yes mate, your terrible opinions about Electrical Storm and Gone are clear to me.
 
Yeah, AIWIY is definitely on the rushmore of studio tracks they were never able to match live, along with Pride, maybe New's Day, maybe Still Haven't Found, maybe even WOWY.

But yeah, AIWIY is absolutely one of his greatest ever vocals, and Edge's guitar solo is incredible. And the string arrangement is, as you said, haunting.

Also, one of the very best music videos they ever made as well.
 
"All I Want Is You" is the biggest grower in their catalog. It's a song that practically every fan instantly falls in love with and over time just reveals itself to be absolute genius. Why that number isn't played every night is beyond me.

I remember buying the second Best Of at Wal-Mart for like $14.99 for three discs of material. An absolute steal. I'll have to try using a DVD scratch fixer at some point though as the Please video didn't work for me when I played it years back...audio was fine but visual was just some distorted green colors.

"Hands" is just fine for what it is...when you put in the context of being an overblown number for a Hollywood epic, it's brilliant and obviously the "most completed" version that airs in the film's end credits is exactly what it should have been. The more stripped down that particular number is, the more its weak songwriting bones are exposed.
 
The version they did on that live TV special was really outstanding.

That truly phenomenal performance was so great that they gave it a Grammy nomination despite "Walk On" having won Record of the Year at the previous awards show.
 
Hands is an awful song, but what I hate the most is how it was used as an intro to Pride in 2015. That was excruciating. Or, no, maybe I hate even more how it was used to neuter the end of Bullet on the Vertigo Tour.

Electrical Storm, in either Original Mix or Radio 1 leaked demo version, is one of the best post-Pop songs. I've always loved it. I wouldn't put it near my top 10 or 20 like I did when I joined this site all those years ago, but I still rate it really highly. I do not consider the William Orbit Mix to exist.

And the new mixes of Gone and Numb are superior, I don't care what any of you say. New mixes of Discotheque and SATS can get fucked though. And I'd love to know why MW has that one different lyric. Or why the UK and Japan versions got The Fly as a bonus track but Australia did not, despite getting the ATYCLB and HTDAAB bonus tracks.

This post will, no doubt, induce a fit for laz. Yes mate, your terrible opinions about Electrical Storm and Gone are clear to me.

I will always go to bat for the Pop version of Gone. What the new mix does is it takes the beautiful, haunting, other-worldly instrumentation(I've said this before, but Edge makes his guitar cry) of the Pop version and makes it too...I don't know...ordinary. That arrangement worked very well live, but it just doesn't in that studio take for me And the vocal is worse too, Bono's vocal on the Pop version is so good.

I like the new mix of Numb though.
 
I will always go to bat for the Pop version of Gone. What the new mix does is it takes the beautiful, haunting, other-worldly instrumentation(I've said this before, but Edge makes his guitar cry) of the Pop version and makes it too...I don't know...ordinary. That arrangement worked very well live, but it just doesn't in that studio take for me And the vocal is worse too, Bono's vocal on the Pop version is so good.

I like the new mix of Numb though.

The New Mix is way more punchy than the Pop version. Those guitars sound incredible, they're a big part of why I'm posting here today.

I remember when I then got Pop. Discotheque and SATS obviously sounded much better in their original form, so I was really excited when I got to Gone. I wondered how I could love the song more, and it seemed pretty plausible it was going to get better. It doesn't. Hell, it almost feels muffled compared to how powerful the New Mix is.

But on AIWIY, great post LM. That studio version is incredible. But I'll have to disagree with namkcuR that it's one of U2's few songs not better live. Some of those Lovetown versions are great, especially that night they played it as a medley with Bad. That was something else indeed, and it's a shame Sil's Australian cousin is shrieking all over the bootleg.
 
Critical reaction is always subjective and thus probably shouldn't be used as some kind of evidence of the absolute value, or lack thereof, of a piece of work.

But see, I was never assigning that value to the album for others or myself, nor would there ever be reason to do so. I was merely pointing out that people outside of the fan base generally did not care for the record and I'd get yelled at like I was preaching some falsehood.

I assigned my value to SOI upon listening to it. It was a boring, overproduced record with hardly any moments of excitement outside of "California" which was the only number that drew me in and the only one I liked after about another dozen listens. "Iris" and "Every Breaking Wave" were both good numbers let down sorely by their arrangements and productions - as the tour performances made clear to me.

If anything, the instant drop was fun because it left the critical establishment out of the equation entirely. The album was already in the hands of millions (whether they wanted it or not) and people could just press play and decide for themselves. And even the general listeners on sites like Metacritic and RateYourMusic felt it was decidedly a cut below even their recent LPs.

And of course, even the album's biggest proponents agreed at the time that it lacked a big song and obviously nothing even remotely resembling a hit emerged out of that project It's just strange that for a band that spends years tinkering to death on songs that they couldn't even twist a single number into greatness.
 
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The New Mix is way more punchy than the Pop version. Those guitars sound incredible, they're a big part of why I'm posting here today.

I remember when I then got Pop. Discotheque and SATS obviously sounded much better in their original form, so I was really excited when I got to Gone. I wondered how I could love the song more, and it seemed pretty plausible it was going to get better. It doesn't. Hell, it almost feels muffled compared to how powerful the New Mix is.

Yeah, I thought this was decided back in 2002 when the new mix rightfully received a lot of raves. It isn't perfect at capturing the highs of the live takes, but it's close enough to get the job done. The only Pop-era track for me that can compare is the original mix of Discotheque.

New mix of Discotheque has no reason to ever have proponents and is the perfect example of them quickly backpedaling on their 90s weirdness and entering a safe zone where they stayed ever since. Ignoring the alternate mixes that are just different time lengths, this might be the worst one they have ever done and this band has done a lot of alternate and single mixes. Hell, usually they improve on the material.

New mix of SATS was much closer to being in that Oasis pop realm that they had kind of imagined for the song from the start, but it just feels a little less intense. You trim the rough, weirder leanings off a lot of U2 songs and then they can just become fairly generic numbers.

Numb is take it or leave it. It's just more of a personal preference for people based on some minute changes. More in the realm of a Remixed/Remastered track than a New Mix.


God, thinking about it more, there's absolutely no reason to even have Discotheque on the second Best Of if you're just going to drastically change the song around so much. It's therefore not the same tune so it doesn't need to be on there for historical context and it's also a tune they feel isn't representative of the band to begin with or else they wouldn't have done the hatchet job to it. No doubt in retrospect that they would just give its spot to "Zooropa" and "Discotheque" would just be in line with "Boots" and "Miracle" as forgettable first singles that didn't achieve want the band intended.
 
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:up: for AIWIY. Listened to a few recordings of it from i+e and they nailed it, then of course played it sparsely for the rest of the tour. I think it may well be the number one U2 song I want to hear live but haven't.
 
The New Mix is way more punchy than the Pop version. Those guitars sound incredible, they're a big part of why I'm posting here today.

I remember when I then got Pop. Discotheque and SATS obviously sounded much better in their original form, so I was really excited when I got to Gone. I wondered how I could love the song more, and it seemed pretty plausible it was going to get better. It doesn't. Hell, it almost feels muffled compared to how powerful the New Mix is.

But on AIWIY, great post LM. That studio version is incredible. But I'll have to disagree with namkcuR that it's one of U2's few songs not better live. Some of those Lovetown versions are great, especially that night they played it as a medley with Bad. That was something else indeed, and it's a shame Sil's Australian cousin is shrieking all over the bootleg.

You say the new mix is punchier...that's the problem. I don't think the more direct guitars help the song. I love the spacier siren-like guitar in the album version.

As for AIWIY...the lovetown versions are great, but they still don't match the majesty of that studio version. Not for me, anyway.

Slight tangent though, the best recording of Lovetown AIWIY is on the Lovetown Documentary, but I hate how it cuts away during the solo at the end so people can talk over it. Terrible editing decision.
 
The only thing worse than that is music docos where they cut away In The Middle Of The Song for an interview snippet.
 
:up: for AIWIY. Listened to a few recordings of it from i+e and they nailed it, then of course played it sparsely for the rest of the tour. I think it may well be the number one U2 song I want to hear live but haven't.

I got it at my I+E show as well, and it was the first time I ever got it. I was ecstatic.
 
You sure about that? Looking at metacritic right now and the user reviews are 63 positive, 19 mixed, and 9 negative.

U2 Music Profile - Metacritic


I guess the user score ended up topping Bomb but it was way below that within a few weeks of its release. I know there was a concerted effort around here though to boost the Metacritic score with at least one user even saying how they had been e-mailing Metacritic to incorporate a review or two and "adjust" one of the scores. I don't even know why people care.

I mean, you can just do that with anything. Let the super fans of anything flood a review site so that it loses a sampling of votes from the "general audience" and then lo and behold it appears that the masses actually liked it!

But come on. A 64/100. Music critics are notoriously generous to the point that it's hard for anything to score below a 60 in a given year. And U2 had a real life friend giving them a 100 score for The Guardian and Rolling Stone giving them another infamous five star review. Talk all you want about critics coming into things with their inherent biases, but can it ever get more biased than that?
 
Well, I guess the stronger bias is when Kanye walks on the stage because his friend's wife didn't win another award.
 
I've always liked Hands. I loved the way it played with the credits at the end of the movie, too.



I liked it a hell of a lot in that context, yet found it hard to listen to otherwise.



The version actually in the film has that long intro with the electric guitar soloing, considerably better than what's on that atrocity of a Best Of collection and that above clip.



This is probably why. IDK what the general consensus is around here on versions of Electrical Storm people prefer, but I had a weird love/hate thing with that one depending on which version too, vastly preferring the version with a guitar over the boring one. :shrug:


It's still pretty weak though. So glad they didn't win an Oscar for it.

Not saying hands was deserving, but...mom’s spaghetti wasn’t either.
 
Never go to a gig with me because you're guaranteed to not get AIWIY - and, worse, it will show up in the set very shortly thereafter. Happened in 2005, 2006, and 2010!

As for Gone, I'm surprised how much praise the live version gets. I've never thought it topped the studio version. It's still great but nothing hits as hard for me as the New Mix, and that's saying something given there are probably only about five U2 songs where I'd say there is no live version better than the studio version.
 
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