SATYAdaimoku said:
First of all, and before there is any question about this, I think it is a really good album. It's not as good as the big three of Achtung Baby, Rattle and Hum or Joshua Tree, but it is a solid CD with a lot of good tracks that I have enjoyed the first couple of times through (and, generally speaking, I'm likely to end up enjoying the album more on each successive time listening to it).
However, at the same time, the album has crystalized for me some of the ambiguous feelings I had about All That You Can't Leave Behind. Like that album, Dismantle is so melodic and sweet and... nice. Really nice. And therein lies the problem.
I tend to think ATYCLB was a much better album than HTDAAB and I honestly can't see some people liking HTDAAB and not liking ATYCLB. So your critique of ATYCLB I don't agree with. ATYCLB was the album that thematically fits with AB and Zooropa. It's basically POP without U2 thinking they need to have techno in there.
And ATYCLB has bite to it. There's not anger but there is a tremendous amount of saddness and desperation in a song like Walk On. It's not R&H Silve and Gold but it is certainly there.
HTDAAB just doesn't have that. To me it's like a watered down version of ATYCLB. Hopefully U2 will reverse course and reinvent the wheel with the next album or I can see this being the first album where they simply start the aged rock retreading their greatest hits phase of their career.
There are parts on this album that are great. LAPOE is a great song. It's interesting to listen to because there's a lot of variety in it. It's a blues song with this scary bass and while it's about love it's not exactly the most lovey dovey song. It's a nice set of contradictions.
Take a song like SYCMIOYO. It's a good song because it has parts like "Can you hear me when I sing?" but other than that little part it pretty much is a song that doesn't rock the audio boat. It's a solid foundation but doesn't have much built up on it. After that verse the song quiets back down into what the rest of the song was like. The climax of the song is "You are the reason the opera is in me." and that's wow fuck powerful but then it's followed up with a cliche of "Still gotta let you know a house does not make a home. Don't leave me here alone." Couldn't Bono have thought of something better to go there instead of "a house doesn't make a home."
I probably lack the musical terminology to describe what I am hearing on the album really. It just seems very bland and then has these great parts on it. Taking iTunes and putting the selector in the middle of Crumbs From Your Table, One Step Closer and Original of the Species really doesn't give me anything different from driving guitar, laid back drums, and Bono singing like he's reciting a poem which all builds up into the part where Edge kicks in with the echoing guitar, and Bono does the soaring vocal thing.
There's differences in parts of the song but the vast majority of it is just the same sort of filler rock with little variation. Sonically the songs sound so similar. Even on ATYCLB where the songs aren't very edgy and angry they still have very different sonic charachteristics to them. On HTDAAB the sonic characteristics are just so bland other than LAPOE, Vertigo, COBL and Yahweh. And four out of eleven ain't bad but it's hardly good considering what U2 has previously put out.
Also this is the opening three lines of ABOY:
I was born a child of grace
Nothing else about the place
Everything was ugly but your beautiful face
I can give you the grace and face line but the ONLY reason Nothing else about the place is even in there is because it rhymes with grace and face. It's such a cliched thing to say to start off with and then it doesn't even fit with the lyrics. "I was born a child of grace, nothing else about the place." The place where he was born? That's all he has to say about the place where he was born was that when he was born there he was born a child of grace? But that wasn't the only thing about the place. There he was an ugly child of grace and there was a beautiful face. I mean it fits with the melody and it works alright when you sing it but if you listen to it more than twice you sort of go "Wow that was a pretty lazy throw away line." It reminds me of a b-side lyric where you say "Well that lyric should have been different but since it's only a b-side they didn't put a lot more effort into it since the rest of the song was kind of so-so."
Not just picking on ABOY and saying one little part makes the album not that great but there's just too many times where I'm listening and going "Eh I could take this or leave it."
I got this album sometime Monday I believe and listened to it that week and all this weekend. This Monday came though and I'm just bored with it. When I first listened to it I sort of felt this but then I'd get caught up in it and think it was great for a couple of listen throughs. And the songs aren't bad but it reminds me of that album by whatever band that you buy and it's great in a few parts and you can listen the hell out of it for a week and then after that you realize there isn't much else there.
Well sadly I'm realizing that there isn't much else there. It's just a much weaker version of ATYCLB. I don't see where 4 years of work is on this thing. I love U2 and I'm going to see them in concert more than once time and money permiting but this just doesn't seem like a U2 album. It seems like their first real misfire to me. Hopefully they'll pull a Zooropa and release a very raw different sounding album between legs of the tour. The worst that could happen is they simply release TTWHT in a few years and it's the same recycled songs.
And don't get me wrong I could listen to songs talking about love being the only thing important in this world all day as long as they're fundamentally good songs.
Also 90% of bands out there will never make an album as good as HTDAAB. And I do think Yahweh, and LAPOE are great songs and that SYCMITO and COBL are good simply for SYCMITO's opera part and COBL is just a solid song. Vertigo is a good song but there should be a song at about track 6 that is more of a hard rocker that is even better than it. As it is Vertigo just seems tacked onto the front of this adult contemporary album.