SOE FAN + industry reviews only

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
See posts with no answers
Status
Not open for further replies.
Summer of Love is right up there with Crystal Ballroom.... among the sexiest, if not THE sexiest thing these boys have ever put to wax.
 
Yes, Summer of Love is wonderful. Great, shuffling groove, and sexy as hell.

There is really something for everyone on this album.

Book of Your Heart is not even on the album and that song is amazing. I hear JT/AB era magic in that song.
 
Really solid album. Find landlady and love is bigger to be the weak links. Overall, 8/10 for me. Summer of Love and Red Flag Day are definite stand outs and I am loving Love is all we have left.

The album feels loose and inspired.

Very happy fan!
 
pop_mofo said:
Really solid album. Find landlady and love is bigger to be the weak links. Overall, 8/10 for me. Summer of Love and Red Flag Day are definite stand outs and I am loving Love is all we have left.

The album feels loose and inspired.

Very happy fan!
Click to expand...

Easily the peer of Joshua and Baby. Dreams come true.
 
Y2K said:
Rolling Stone named SOE the 3rd best album of the year. Before it was even released!
Click to expand...

RS naming Songs of Innocence as number 1 with Springsteen's High Hopes at number 2 was ever so slightly farcical! And U2 and Springsteen are probably my two favourite artists ever. High Hopes was just some spare cuts album that I don't really consider as a proper Springsteen album. I'd like to think that SOE is somewhat more justified in it's inclusion than it's predecessor.
 
Y2K said:
Rolling Stone named SOE the 3rd best album of the year. Before it was even released!

50 Best Albums of 2017 | Rolling Stone
Click to expand...

This is interesting. After the revelation that Jan Wenner insisted that SOI be named the best album of the year, I was worried that this album--a record that TRULY deserves that kind of consideration--might get panned just as some kind of balance.

I keep wondering what might these two records have sounded like as a double album.
 
Y2K said:
Rolling Stone named SOE the 3rd best album of the year. Before it was even released!

50 Best Albums of 2017 | Rolling Stone
Click to expand...

copy/pasted...

3. U2, 'Songs of Experience'

U2, 'Songs of Experience'
Opening with a prayer and benediction – "Love Is All We Have Left" – that finds Bono leaping down a rabbit hole of pop-vocal processing to deliver one of his most emotive songs ever, U2's latest finds the band coming to terms with a world closer to the brink than at any time during their career. They meet the moment with precisely the right balance of grandeur and grace, harnessing their earnest post-punk past to their remarkable facility for modern pop gestures, abetted by producers Jacknife Lee, Ryan Tedder, Steve Lillywhite, Danger Mouse and others. Fittingly for dark times, images of love and light abound ("There Is a Light," "Lights of Home," "Ordinary Love," "Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way"), and Kendrick Lamar even drops in to flip some Biblical Beatitudes. But alongside piousness is pure fun. See "The Showman (Little More Better)," which is vintage sock-hop shimmy-shake with a seasoned protagonist cheekily declaring "I got just enough low self-esteem to get myself where I need to go." It's a rock & roll creation myth that manifests the music's eternal magic, delivered by a band that refuses to let it fade. W.H.
Click to expand...
 
After having heard the album about 20 times, I have to say I’m really satisfied with the amount of good to great songs on it.

Unfortunately SOE also has a few more or less disappointing songs (especially TBT and AS, and to a lesser degree GOOYOW) that makes the album very good instead of great.

Score at this moment: 8/10
 
Another review. This time courtesy of Neil McCormick from The Telegraph:

U2's Songs of Experience is full of desperation and meaty hooks in equal measure

U2’s 14th studio album opens with one of the most vulnerable and fragile songs of their 41-year-career. Love Is All We Have Left swells on trembling strings and synths, with Bono’s close, cracked vocal blending into digital auto-tune as he conjures a space age lullaby for an impending apocalypse. “This is no time not to be alive,” he sings.

It’s a short, strange, sparse vignette, its spectral beauty interrupted by a gnarly distorted guitar riff as the veteran band turn on the power, and roll exultantly into Lights of Home, a chunky anthem brushing off near-death experience (“I shouldn’t be here cos I should be dead”) to reach for the light at the end of the tunnel. “Free yourself to be yourself,” choral voices command in a coda purpose built for mass singalongs. This is surely closer to the idea that most listeners have of U2 as an upbeat, inspirational, anthemic rock band. And Songs of Experience is full of such moments: big meaty hooks matched by singalong aphorisms (“Get out of your own way!” “Love is bigger than anything in its way”). But the sound of a man in conflict and crisis also runs through the centre of this highly personal collection of songs, undercutting and ultimately deepening the spirit of can do positivity.

Songs of Experience is a companion to 2014’s Songs of Innocence (the one they controversially gave away free on iTunes, whether you wanted it or not). It even reuses some themes. A fantastic throwaway coda from that album’s Volcano returns as the hook to anti-Trump political anthem American Soul. Closing track There Is A Light is a tender reworking of Song For Someone, shifting its focus from the singer’s wife Ali to their four children, urging them to summon the strength to face uncertain times: “I know the world is done but you don’t have to be.”

As chief U2 lyricist, Bono has been at his most confessional on these two albums. Innocence was an autobiographical look back at the forces that shaped U2 growing up, its modern pop textures filtered through their new wave rock roots, as if debut album Boy was being revisited through the prism of a grown-up. On Experience, that same Man is in the grips of mid-life crisis, confronting problems in the world and himself. It was conceived by Bono as a series of letters to loved ones, something that you might write if you knew you were going to die. There have been hints of a health scare in recent interviews, although the big surprise to anyone who has known him as long as I have is that he admits to his first real crisis of faith. “Oh Jesus if you’re still my friend / What the hell you done for me?” he cries out on Lights of Home. “Sometimes the end is not coming, the end is here,” he sings with a tone of shattered bewilderment on existential ballad The Little Things That Give You Away.

U2’s familiar optimism is still present on good humoured songs like The Showman and Landlady, but it’s undercut by the inescapable impression that this is music made to keep pessimism at bay. Meanwhile personal struggles are made explicitly political on the album’s punchiest sequence, where he moves from grappling with America’s swing to the right on Get Out of Your Way (“You got to bite back / The face of Liberty’s starting to crack / She had a plan until she got smacked in the mouth / And it all went South”) to the human cost of Europe’s refugee crisis on Summer of Love (“In the rubble of Aleppo / Flowers blooming in the shadows” ).


Musically, though, Experience is perhaps their most old fashioned album, in part because they are no longer so reliant on conjuring science fiction soundscapes to compensate for musical limitations. Adam Clayton’s bass playing has never been as nimble, Larry Mullen’s drumming never more loosely free-spirited. Even inventive guitarist the Edge seems less reliant on effects, relishing juicy Beatle chords and carefully articulated slide guitar solos. As a lifelong fan, I’m not sure I entirely approve of this development, however. There are harmonic shades of the California soft rock of Fleetwood Mac, while You’re The Best thing About Me essays the raunch of the Rolling Stones – the kind of band the young U2 wanted to sweep away but now cite as role models. Jacknife Lee and a whole team of state-of-the-art producers and engineers have been brought on board to lend everything a detailed, dynamic, up-to-date sonic polish but only one track, The Blackout, pushes towards the kind of audacious cyberpunk energy of Achtung Baby. This is a band who are now perhaps over eager to compete on the radio and in the charts with their successors, Coldplay and The Killers, but might be better served following artier trajectories of their own.

But as the title makes plain, Songs of Experience is not the work of young men. It showcases U2 at their most mature and assured, playing songs of passion and purpose, shot through and enlivened with a piercing bolt of desperation. “The showman gives you front row to his heart / Making a spectacle of falling apart,” Bono sings with defiant humour on The Showman, and it is this spectacle that makes Experience so compelling. A little battered by time and bloodied by events, U2 remain defiantly unbowed, as determined as ever to make mass market music that really matters.


'Songs of Experience' is released on Friday
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
I'm enjoying the album with some reservations, but I have to say that I am so glad that Neil McCormick called The Edge out on the lack of experimental textures nowadays. I somewhat cringe every time since Atomic Bomb that Edge whips out some bluesy riff; to me, that is the antithesis of the kind of sound that he should be mustering, and this goes hand in hand with something like the chorus of American Soul, wherein Bono is mustering too much RAWK, the nature of his approach to anthems taking on a much more rock and roll tone than I'd like. Since McCormick is a close friend, I hope the boys take his words to heart and, as he says, follow artier trajectories of their own.

I do think this album is inventive, but not exactly innovative, and I really hope the boys pursue a more experimental path - artier, less rock and roll - for whatever comes next.
 
Last edited:
Musically, though, Experience is perhaps their most old fashioned album, in part because they are no longer so reliant on conjuring science fiction soundscapes to compensate for musical limitations. Adam Clayton’s bass playing has never been as nimble, Larry Mullen’s drumming never more loosely free-spirited. Even inventive guitarist the Edge seems less reliant on effects, relishing juicy Beatle chords and carefully articulated slide guitar solos. As a lifelong fan, I’m not sure I entirely approve of this development, however. There are harmonic shades of the California soft rock of Fleetwood Mac, while You’re The Best thing About Me essays the raunch of the Rolling Stones – the kind of band the young U2 wanted to sweep away but now cite as role models. Jacknife Lee and a whole team of state-of-the-art producers and engineers have been brought on board to lend everything a detailed, dynamic, up-to-date sonic polish but only one track, The Blackout, pushes towards the kind of audacious cyberpunk energy of Achtung Baby. This is a band who are now perhaps over eager to compete on the radio and in the charts with their successors, Coldplay and The Killers, but might be better served following artier trajectories of their own.

This paragraph encapsulates my feelings after the first listening of the album. And I guess this has to do alot with edge's guitar sound. The sonic dimension of this album with the exception of Love is all we have left, The little things that give you away and The blackout is not the one I'm very fond of. Someone else here mentioned Cave's Skeleton Tree as a model of Love is all we have left. I would like them to follow this ''dark'' sonic direction, like bowie's last album for example, in order for the meaning and the lyrics of these songs to find a more exact sonic reflection, if i can put it this way.
 
While U2 started out as a kind of "zero hour" band that had no nod to the past, and stayed away from the blues, bendy string solos, etc...I really don't have a problem with them growing from that and incorporating all styles. Joshua Tree and R&H kind of blew away that idea, anyway. They came back with Edge doing some of his most industrial/experimental stuff, but the idea of resisting the style of blues/rawk was no longer part of their identity, again blown away by JT/R&H. I also like the more atmospheric stuff from Edge, and he chimes and screams from time to time, but it is more muted. It works for me, though
 
While I still feel Edge is in the backseat to the rest of the band, I enjoy his playing a lot more on this album compared to the last two. He really fell in love with the Walk On Chime, and seemed to be his go to for every song.

He has such a gift of rhythm, and it's why I wish the songs were a little longer. Let some of the music play out before going into the song, or just ending quickly. I don't need a The Fly solo every song (though to hear something down that path before they retire would be wonderful).

I'll take an entire album of SOL, LL, Velvet Dress....I think U2 could make one of the best "blue" albums of all time. Bono in a lower register, Adam and Larry laying down something sexy, and Edge coming up with rhythms and sparse colorful colors
 
BEAL said:
While I still feel Edge is in the backseat to the rest of the band, I enjoy his playing a lot more on this album compared to the last two. He really fell in love with the Walk On Chime, and seemed to be his go to for every song.

He has such a gift of rhythm, and it's why I wish the songs were a little longer. Let some of the music play out before going into the song, or just ending quickly. I don't need a The Fly solo every song (though to hear something down that path before they retire would be wonderful).

I'll take an entire album of SOL, LL, Velvet Dress....I think U2 could make one of the best "blue" albums of all time. Bono in a lower register, Adam and Larry laying down something sexy, and Edge coming up with rhythms and sparse colorful colors
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, Landlady, Your Blue Room, SLABT, Love is All... type stuff is some of my favorite U2. Would love an album heavy on that style.
 
BEAL said:
While I still feel Edge is in the backseat to the rest of the band, I enjoy his playing a lot more on this album compared to the last two. He really fell in love with the Walk On Chime, and seemed to be his go to for every song.

He has such a gift of rhythm, and it's why I wish the songs were a little longer. Let some of the music play out before going into the song, or just ending quickly. I don't need a The Fly solo every song (though to hear something down that path before they retire would be wonderful).

I'll take an entire album of SOL, LL, Velvet Dress....I think U2 could make one of the best "blue" albums of all time. Bono in a lower register, Adam and Larry laying down something sexy, and Edge coming up with rhythms and sparse colorful colors
Click to expand...



I wouldn’t say he’s taking a back seat. We’re really not sure how much responsibility he has in the song writing process. His guitars may be less chimey or less front and center but he could have pretty much written the entire way the song should be put together.

“Ok cue the organ here and go right into the cymbals there to create space” Edge

“Edge you’re not in this song at all? Where’s the chime delay”? Jackknife

“Come on guys do I have to do EVERYTHING by myself”?! Edge

[emoji6]
 
Last edited:
Well Consequence of Sound, just posted on Facebook that Rolling Stone named U2's Horrible Songs of Experience as the number 3 album of the year.

Same twats that boasted that they just - "Shit on U2's new album" back in 2014.

And by the accompanying "article" it seems they didn't even listen to it yet, just going by comments they've read....

I don't usually do this, but please, anyone that wants to deluge them with comments, please do.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Headache in a Suitcase
  • Locked
The Final Countdown - U2 at Sphere - General Discussion Thread Part 3
18 19 20
Replies
574
Views
25K
Headache in a Suitcase
Headache in a Suitcase
Janet H
  • Sticky
Forum Update - We're back! Ask your questions here.
2
Replies
36
Views
3K
Popmartijn
Popmartijn
Headache in a Suitcase
  • Sticky
U2 Fans Helping Other U2 Fans Get Tickets
16 17 18
Replies
519
Views
28K
clerks
clerks
O
Better late than never “they” say…
Replies
1
Views
317
Headache in a Suitcase
Headache in a Suitcase
Scorpionac
Songs that would fit better on SOI vs. SOE?
Replies
1
Views
423
Headache in a Suitcase
Headache in a Suitcase

Latest posts

Back
Top Bottom