Here's the review.
U2 is:
Bono singin'
The Edge shredding guitar
Adam Clayton plodding along
and Larry Mullen Jr keeping them in check.
Disclaimer: U2 are my favourite band. Take the reviews with a grain of salt.
My U2 journey began back in the early years of the noughties, when the celebrated All That You Can’t Leave Behind and its hits were doing the rounds. I liked the songs – though the Elevation clip is something that I’m forever trying to rid from my mind – but back then music was nothing more than what I heard over the radio or on Rage on Saturday morning. Luckily, I’m beyond that now.
In 2004, Vertigo came out, and I loved it. Got the album as a Christmas present, and loved it for a long time. It was at this time that I joined
Interference, a U2 forum, and that forum is really the reason why I love music like I do now. A few months down the road and I had in my possession ATYCLB and Achtung Baby as well as How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Then I got The Joshua Tree, and it turned me from fan to fanatic, and despite the fact Achtung Baby is now my favourite U2 album, The Joshua Tree is only ever so slightly behind it.
It was the album which broke U2 pretty much everywhere, and gave them the creative freedom with which to produce 1988’s follow up, Rattle and Hum. Its predecessor was 1984’s hallmark album The Unforgettable Fire, full of the rich soundscapes which were characteristics of its producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Sadly, their solo work will always be an afterthought thanks to their brilliant work as producers. And the good news for U2 fans is they are back for the upcoming album.
This album is the beginning of U2’s ‘America’ period. (If you study concert dates and cities performed at the wonderful
U2 Vertigo Tour - U2 tour news, pictures, reviews you could argue it is yet to end) After beginning in 1976, the band churned out four albums in four years between 1980 and 1984, including TUF, which spawned hits such as Pride (In the Name of Love) and perennial fan favourite Bad. Following was Live Aid and The Conspiracy of Hope tour. It earned them a break. Three years in fact. And they came back with their best album yet. They landed on the cover Rolling Stone as “Rock’s Hottest Ticket”, and also made the cover of Time magazine, only the fourth band to do so after The Beatles, The Who and The Band (incidentally the only bad not to begin with the word ‘the’).
Where the Streets Have No Name is the opening to this album. It lasts one minute and 46 seconds, and is the second longest intro in U2’s entire catalogue. It sets a perfect mood for a near-perfect album. Beginning with simple organs, Larry and Adam come in before Edge hits those notes. The remaining few minutes are transcendental, and there’s no wonder it became on of U2’s most loved songs. Whilst the band believes they never quite nailed the album version, I feel they don’t miss a beat. Live, this song is something otherworldly. It’s pure magic. The intro makes grown men weep. There is quite an interesting story surrounding its recording too; indeed it is frightening to think how close we came to not getting ‘Streets’. Of the year or so that it took to record the album, supposedly some half of it was dedicated to trying to get Streets right. With its changing time sequences (the intro is 6/8 time, whilst the remainder of the track is in 4/4 time) it was proving difficult to record. Fabled artist/producer Brian Eno was becoming increasingly frustrated with the time being spent on it that he thought it would be better to wipe the track and start again. The band having left the room, Eno was free to begin wiping the track. All of sudden Pat McCarthy, the junior engineer burst into the room, dropping coffee and managed to convince Brian that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. And we have him to thank.
With or Without You is my favourite U2 song, namely because of the simplicity. Basic lyrics, a repeated line over and over, a plodding bass line playing a few chords continued throughout, held together by Larry. But what makes the song here is The Edge’s outro. It is timeless; Bono begins it with some soft “oooohs” and then Edge comes in with one of the most moving guitar parts certainly I’ve ever heard. Extraordinarily moving, it also speaks to the listener, and was their first real ‘love’ song, though it too is tinged with the pitfalls of love, as so many U2 songs are. Live, it too takes on another form. Regularly clocking in at over six minutes, on the most recent tour U2 snippeted the songs of two of their biggest influences, INXS and Joy Division, playing Never Tear us Apart and Love Will Tear us Apart respectively.
Rounding out the infamous “holy trilogy” of U2 songs is the perennial favourite I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. At its simplest level, it’s a gospel song. Deeper however, it’s a song of many intricacies and, as is with many U2 songs, can be interpreted in every which way. Its gospel roots were acknowledged when the songs was performed with the New Voices of Freedom choir, which can be found on the Rattle and Hum album/movie. This song is also a great example of why many U2 fans forgive Bono’s perceived ‘preaching’ - the vocals are mesmerising. You can literally hear, and almost feel the emotion.
For some strange reason, I’ve always loved songs about drugs. I think they provide wonderful imagery, and also offer the listener ways in which to ponder the topic atypically. This is why Running to Stand Still is one of my all-time favourites. Inspired by Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, the song is about a female heroin user who is trying desperately to break her dependence on the drug (running), but cannot (stand still), giving the title is paradoxical nature. The music is sublime, ranging from soft piano to Bono’s very underrated harmonica playing, to the yielding effect of Larry’s drums, to the heartbreaking guitar plucking from the Edge. The lyrics provide amazing imagery, lines such as “I took the poison from the poison stream and I floated out of here…” to “you gotta cry without weeping, talk without speaking and scream without raising your voice…” which prove to me why Bono and U2 are ‘streets’ ahead of Coldplay. But that’s an argument for another day. I continue to preach U2 live, and there’s no stopping here. On it’s first two tours (JT tour and Lovetown) it was driven mostly by piano and ended with the “I’m still runnin’…” refrain, and is immortalised on the Rattle and Hum movie. But with ZooTV it became simply spellbinding. This time driven mostly by Edge’s guitar (but never forgetting the drums), Bono acted as an addict, and upon the final lines pretended to shoot up. He then sung the “alle, alle, alleluja” refrain, which became one of U2’s most powerful live moments. The moral (though some argued ‘amoral) behind the song was that “if you don’t like the world you’re living in, see it through different eyes. And heroin gives you heroin eyes to see the world through.” An amazing epigram because it doesn’t condemn drug users to depths of hell, as many people have.
America was stirring U2, and while this album has plenty of its pro-America moments, there are also two tracks which beat down on American, specifically the Reagan era. They are Bullet the Blue Sky and Mothers of the Disappeared. The former is a scathing song about the band biting the hand that fed them; an attack on American oppression of Latin America, a topic Bono felt the Irish could relate with. It contains some of Larry and Adam’s best work, the two meshing perfectly to create a quite frightening tone as Edge and Bono come in. It’s captured quite perfectly on the album; and I think unless you are viewing 90s performances of the song (or the occasional ripper Elevation performance), live it lets itself down through the chorus. Whilst the rest of the song sounds menacing, I’ve always thought they never nailed the chorus, especially because Edge’s backing vocals take away some of the menace. But it still remains a fierce beast: and has a terrific solo.
The latter is more on South America, this time the Argentinean military’s decision to take opposing children away from their mothers and do with them what they pleased, never to be seen or heard again. A stolen generation. Haunting and chilling, the song makes use of synthesiser to convey emotion, and is a solid, if somewhat mournful, way to finish the album. It is one of the album’s weaker spots, but again I stress that it still rates 3½ stars, and if you can find a performance from the Popmart tour (I recommend Santiago 1998) you will see it too evolved live.
One of the few, miniscule cons this album has is that after an almost flawless first half, the b-side doesn’t quite match up to it. Beginning with Red Hill Mining Town, a song about how miners were disadvantaged thanks to the wrath of Maggie Thatcher, it still stands the test of time but doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first five tracks. Lyrically it was a way for U2 to get more in touch with the blue-collar crowd they had every so slightly drifted away from. RHMT is the only song from this album never to have been performed live, allegedly because Bono could not reach the register night after night. The song is nice enough, laced with harmonies and a great melody, and has a top outro.
Following it is the fast-paced-yet-altogether-awesome In God’s Country, which is the only song on the album which really explicitly expresses a love for America, name-checking the various abstract nouns which are commonly associated with the country, such as “dream”, “liberty” and “hope”. It was released as a North American-only single, but did not fare as well as the three aforementioned singles. It also has a terrific coda. It was another song that connected with U2’s religious notions: “It has a spiritual aspect, which the record has, and also a great deal of mystery, which I like.” The Edge once mused.
The poetic One Tree Hill is written about a New Zealander, the late Greg Carroll. Carroll was a man that Bono met on tour, and they became great friends. He was Bono’s right-hand man, and when he died atop his motorbike, driving home in the rain, the band was shattered, and so they wrote a song for him, and it has been U2’s connection with New Zealand ever since. His death was a real reality check for the band, and inspired the lyrics of renewal and redemption. The actual tree on the hill, like the actual Joshua tree, no longer exists, after it was chopped down by activist. The song is normally played each time the band visit New Zealand, and you’ll find a particularly stirring performance of the song was played on 26/12/1989. The song itself is slow-burning, building nicely, and relying on the incredible vocals of frontman Bono. The lyrical content is perhaps his best effort yet, with lyrics packed with plenty of metaphors and wonderful imagery. One example is the opening line, “we turn away to face the cold, enduring chill”, one of the more thoughtful ways to express death.
U2 also developed their own Charles Manson-esque story with this album, thanks to the song Exit. For the uneducated, Charles Manson was a deluded cult leader who went on a killing spree, citing The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ as the song which had inspired him to do so. Exit, which was the darkest and most introspective work the band had done to date, took on a similar form for Robert John Bardo. He murdered budding young actress Rebecca Shaeffer, and said he had been inspired by the lyrics (”His hand in his pocket, his finger on the steel”) and music of Exit to do so. The case never went any further, but it did highlight the influence U2 was beginning to have in pop culture. Exit is the final of six songs for this album I rate five stars, and is a well-loved song by fanatics. Beginning very quietly, Bono almost whispers the opening verse before the song, made so good by the three men behind Bono, and it builds from there. Exploding at a frenetic pace, it was not what most had come to expect, but ensured that they weren’t simply slipped into an “easy listening” or “light rock” kind of label. Live it hasn’t been played since Lovetown, where it was extended with a snippet of Van Morrison’s Gloria, but we can all hope. Bono himself admits that he does not know what the actual ‘act’ is in Exit, but just that it was trying to convey the state of mind of someone driven to the brink of desperation. A way of purging the band’s demons.
U2 also have a penchant for fun, throwaway type songs, and it was embraced with Trip Through Your Wires. Used on the album in the place of Heartland – ironically it sounds as if it would have fitted better on Rattle and Hum – it became better live, opening on a number of occasions. ‘Trip’, plain and simple, is just a fun, throwaway song with a few naughty sexual connotations (”You set my desires, I trip through your wires”, “Angel or devil, I was thirsty and you wet my lips”), but as always there are other interpretations there as well.
Earlier this year U2 released a remastered edition of TJT, and so if you are looking to grab a copy of this album, make sure it is the remastered edition, as original intentions have been restored and codas and intros are in their right place (previously the One Tree Hill coda had been placed at the start of Exit, not at the end of One Tree Hill, where it belongs). The enclosed DVD has a Parisian concert, two documentaries and two never-before-seen videos, including the now infamous (and decidedly cheesy) Red Hill Mining Town video. The remastered edition also includes four songs the band was working on at the time but never finished (Wave of Sorrow (Birdland), Rise Up, Desert of Our Love and Drunk Chicken/America), the best of which was Wave of Sorrow.
It was also a good time for b-sides, with some of the best from this era being Walk to the Water, Luminous Times, Sweetest Thing, Silver and Gold and Spanish Eyes. For live concerts, visit
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Get this while you can.
Where the Streets Have No Name *****
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For *****
With or Without You *****
Bullet the Blue Sky ****½
Running to Stand Still *****
Red Hill Mining Town ****
In God’s Country ****
Trip Through Your Wires ***½
One Tree Hill *****
Exit *****
Mothers of the Disappeared ***½
Total: 49.5/55
Average: 4.5
Score: 90%, A
Time: 50:05
Recommended:
Yes
Great Music to Play While: Listening
i was having a mental blank.
) but ah well. You get that.
and whats the ooc and where is the footy forum sorry? like to know.. didnt know there was such thing
