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Mack_Again said:
there is no way this album is good, in U2 standard. I think U2 can still write more memorable songs that could wow ME again. but SOE has none of those.
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Fixed that for you.

Not sure why you are trying to speak for everyone else posting in this thread when the overwhelming majority like/love the album.

If you don’t like the album, great, but it’s just odd to post that this album isn’t good and infer that SOE has no songs that “wowed US” when almost everyone in this thread has stated the complete opposite. It’s as if you are writing the OP and haven’t read a single reply.....but yeah, you don’t like it, so maybe next time for you.
 
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KUEFC09U2 said:
Anyone who lists the best thing as a triumphant moment of the album clearly doesn't understand the album
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We can disagree about TBT, but I thought the article was one of the best ones out there. She clearly takes them seriously, and had interesting things to say.
 
That New Yorker review is a great example of how a review can be more about itself than the material it reviews. I mean, she spent a good percentage of it reviewing Ginsberg's singing of Songs of Innocence and Experience, dwelling on the SOI release, and drives right through the stop sign on several observations about SOE itself:

The lyrics sound more like sermons to the masses? They're letters to family, friends, fans, himself.

Innocence allows for clichés, but experience doesn't? Maybe the reviewer's not old enough to realize that, after a few years, you start to realize that clichés are there for a reason. The sun does indeed also rise.

Love fixes everything? No, love's, ahem, all you have left when everything else is stripped away. What you do with it is the fix.

Seven paragraphs, and two about SOE, barely. Glad that she loved TBT and Ginsberg's singing of Blake's poem..

But couldn't she have at least referenced that Ginsberg read Miami aloud, too?
 
While I certainly think some of you are sensitive Sallys who can't take anything other than a glowing review... I will say this: the reasoning behind most of these songs is being missed by a ton of reviewers. Part of this is their own fault (did they read the liner notes?) and part of it is U2's own fault (the Trump/Brexit delay statements led many to, ya know, expect a commentary on Trump/Brexit, and has led to many to try and find something that for the most part isn't there).
 
Headache in a Suitcase said:
While I certainly think some of you are sensitive Sallys who can't take anything other than a glowing review... I will say this: the reasoning behind most of these songs is being missed by a ton of reviewers. Part of this is their own fault (did they read the liner notes?) and part of it is U2's own fault (the Trump/Brexit delay statements led many to, ya know, expect a commentary on Trump/Brexit, and has led to many to try and find something that for the most part isn't there).
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Yeah. A lot of reviews talk about how the "anger isn't there" or whatever.
 
Montrose said:
That New Yorker review is a great example of how a review can be more about itself than the material it reviews. I mean, she spent a good percentage of it reviewing Ginsberg's singing of Songs of Innocence and Experience, dwelling on the SOI release, and drives right through the stop sign on several observations about SOE itself:

The lyrics sound more like sermons to the masses? They're letters to family, friends, fans, himself.

Innocence allows for clichés, but experience doesn't? Maybe the reviewer's not old enough to realize that, after a few years, you start to realize that clichés are there for a reason. The sun does indeed also rise.

Love fixes everything? No, love's, ahem, all you have left when everything else is stripped away. What you do with it is the fix.

Seven paragraphs, and two about SOE, barely. Glad that she loved TBT and Ginsberg's singing of Blake's poem..

But couldn't she have at least referenced that Ginsberg read Miami aloud, too?
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It was a thought piece, not a review.
 
i enjoyed this article as well, and i think it gets to SOE's fundamental weaknesses. it's also very thoughtful.

On Their New Albums, Björk and U2 Offer Utopian Visions for Dystopian Times

But their approaches, and their degrees of success, vary widely.

By Carl Wilson
DEC. 05, 2017, 11:25 AM

The arch-eccentric song-synthesist Björk and U2, the last of the grand stadium-rock conquerors, seldom seem to have a lot in common. But at the tail end of a dismally dystopian year, a period that’s seen a lot of pop artists at least gesture to the idea of protest music, usually in shades of anger and disbelief, each of these long-standing artists put out collections that argue for the need to rediscover some form of utopian thinking.

As any barstool smart aleck can tell you, the gotcha coiled inside the word utopia is that while it denotes a land without problems, a perfected society, its Greek roots literally mean “no place.” And utopianism really has had no place in Western public fantasy of late. The drive to try to engineer a heaven on Earth was the tragedy of the 20th century, as in communism and fascism (not to mention eugenics, or suburbia). Which has left most of the planet resigned to one flavor or another of market capitalism—even nominally communist China.

The prominent cultural dream worlds have become dystopian in the modest hope that audiences might at least be motivated to stop the world from literally becoming The Hunger Games. But what happens when people stop being able to envision radical positive alternatives to the dominant state of things? Based on recent evidence, you get the hellscape you’ve been expecting. “The trouble with normal is it always gets worse,” to quote a Cold War–era song from that crunchy Christian socialist Bruce Cockburn. With our imaginations constantly tuned into the apocalyptic, maybe we secretly welcome it.

Yet U2’s Bono has talked about trying to convey the force of “joy as an act of defiance” with Songs of Experience, the long-awaited and quite divisive record the band put out last weekend. And a week earlier, Björk went so far as to title her new album Utopia. “If optimism ever was like an emergency, it’s now,” she’s said. Instead of pure fury and pity, she argues, it’s become urgent to put forward an idea of the kind of world people might want instead. But she’s aware of the rank baggage of the word utopia and fully embraces that absurdity: “I kind of like the fact that it’s a cliché … and I like the fact that it has a fascistic, weird, ‘I want the world to be like this’ feeling about it.”

Her album, then, isn’t a detailed blueprint for Shangri-La—songs make lousy policy papers—but an immersion in what it might feel like to form one. Reaching back to her own bohemian upbringing, Björk combines her first instrument, the flute (in buoyant multipart arrangements), with synthesizers and processed vocal parts that likewise are imbued with breath and inflation and ascendance. It is a virtual reality trip through a rainforest on a lawn chair held up by balloons. On its longest track, “Body Memory,” she sings with a famous Icelandic folk choir she was part of when she was 16 while computer voices spit and stutter. It envisions a world in which technology and ecology are not at odds, but partners in a digital-pagan sublime. She is enveloped in birdsong—via archival field recordings and ones from her own hikes—while texting her friends ecstatically and cooing about MP3s. She creates soundscapes in which we can hear those languages as complementary, rather than threatening each other’s extinction. (A society that can invent the iPhone, she’s said, should also be ingenious enough to kick its addiction to fossil fuels.)

The album’s loose narrative goes out of its way to acknowledge difficulty and strife, but it overcomes them with a lush, gorgeous biodiversity of sound—“to leave our defenses and egos behind, the patriarchy, hierarchies, everything, and travel into pure abandon where no one is a victim,” as she’s described her mutual pact with her younger close collaborator here, Venezuela’s Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca.

On many Utopia tracks, Björk sings lines that split and branch, putting her in duet or trio with herself, while flutes and choirs and waveforms do the same, as if to laugh affectionately over the conceits of individuality and illustrate the malleability of consciousness, if only we would let it be. It reminds me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the mysteries of human desire result in doublings and deceit, transmogrifications and farce, but ultimately the marriage of mechanical town and fairy forest, one in which being earthbound becomes a consummation most divine.

U2, almost by definition, has a shakier sense of the potential ridiculousness of its ideals. And on this album, that makes for a shakier result. As always, though, it is trying hard. (Indeed, that’s a lot of critics’ biggest grievance against it.) I liked their last album, Songs of Innocence, a bit better, for its scrappy evocations of the band’s own coming-of-age in Dublin. But as Bono has explained, this one is about the way that as you grow older, “you realize that the biggest obstacle in the way [of changing the world] is yourself.”

Songs of Experience initially was going to be a more concentratedly personal record. But Brexit, Trump, and the Mediterranean refugee crisis happened during the three years they were recording it, so the band went back and rewrote and rearranged some of the songs, the better to blend their anxieties with everyone else’s. (Also, reportedly for the first time in a long while, to let the songs steep in live rehearsal and performance experience before finalizing them, which is to the album’s advantage.)

Not that Björk and U2 are alone on their utopian paths—there are strains of it on R&B singer-songwriter Miguel’s new album War and Leisure, for example, echoing Prince’s erotic Afro-futurism with images of “pineapple purple skies” that promise “everything’s gonna be all right.” Likewise, saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s revival of the spiritual-jazz sensibilities of John Coltrane and others from the mid-1960s is a utopian counterpoint to the more dystopic bent of his peers in the electronic and hip-hop scenes of Los Angeles—such as Kendrick Lamar, who shows up as a drily sarcastic preacher on U2’s “American Soul” here, repaying his use of that song’s chorus on “XXX,” a far bleaker song about American culture on his album Damn earlier this year.

Still, it’s intriguing to ask why these particular artists are pushing utopian options right now. Each was born into the generational gray zone between those shaped by the disappointed ideals of the 1960s and those who’ve always lived under the unrelenting glare of neoliberalism. (Björk is 52 and Bono 57.) They got their starts in a post-punk period when the term alternative hadn’t yet curdled entirely into a marketing category—Björk’s post-punk band, the Sugarcubes, even toured with U2 for a couple of months in the early 1990s.

My favorite track on Songs of Experience, “Red Flag Day,” reclaims the shouty energy of U2’s early, more ornery post-punk music, in a portrait of a privileged couple trying to recapture their spark on a beach vacation while a family on another shore braces themselves to board a dangerous makeshift raft. Similarly, “Summer of Love” sings of “the West Coast,” suggesting the hippie idylls of 1960s San Francisco, but then adds “not the one that everyone knows”—meaning, instead, the western coast of the Middle East. Its last verse evokes roses sprouting in bomb craters in Aleppo, reminiscent of daisy-in-a-rifle-barrel pictures from Vietnam protests. Some listeners find these juxtapositions crass, but they’re connections that a less gauche, less over-the-top band would never reach for.

And U2’s world maps, like Björk’s, aren’t proportioned like the ones you receive on American TV. They each came out of no-places compared to the centers of global power—U2 from Ireland, Björk from Iceland. As wealthy pop stars, they aren’t at much personal risk from the fallout of neoliberal inequality and nationalist backlashes. (Indeed, with Bono showing up in the rolls of offshore investors in the Paradise Papers, he may be benefiting.) But still, as cosmopolitans from lands Elsewhere, they retain some perspective on the illusion that political and social manipulators use to put over their self-serving scams, that it’s all a matter of irresistible gravity and inertia, of natural laws. It can’t be any different? Well, it’s different where we’re from.

Both albums also reflect the aftereffects of middle-age crises. Bono, in his liner notes to Songs of Experience, reveals that last year he went through an (unspecified) encounter with his own mortality. And Utopia is an account of Björk’s recovery from the devastation of her divorce from artist Matthew Barney, which she depicted on her last, much heavier-sounding album, Vulnicura. Both albums are sequels, reports from the other side of calamity. Where U2’s diptych references their Christian-mystic forbear William Blake, Björk is counterbalancing her Inferno with a Paradiso.

Those are heady ambitions for pop music, so both U2 and Björk make sure to refer back frequently to the form’s standard lyrical touchpoint: the lexicon of love. The difference in how they do so is key to the gap between their achievements. Björk’s vision of love on Utopia is as a kind of a quantum field that binds everything, but one that’s apprehended in tiny, everyday impulses and experiences of friendship, motherhood, romance, sex, work, conflict, and release. (The nearly 10-minute “Body Memory” catalogs them almost systematically.) The passage between macro and micro requires a certain quality of attention. Though its materials are very different, the album’s approach calls to mind the composer and electronic-music pioneer Pauline Oliveros, who died around this time last year, and her techniques of “deep listening”—of seeking the common resonances in disparate sounds, revealing an interdependent aural ecosystem. Utopia, with its dialectics of dense clusters and sparse sonic clearings, likewise encourages the listener not to try to decode and claim it immediately, but to absorb the music as something emergent, as a dizzy unfolding. Which is not a bad model for love or for hope amid dire circumstances.

U2, on the other hand, cannot resist rushing to conclusions, to drawing morals, to insisting on salvation. It can only see love as eros and agape, a binary between the intimate and the grandly spiritual. Far too often this means the songs build up to encomiums to vacuous universal niceness—the “free yourself to be yourself” chant on “Lights of Home” wincingly recalls 1960s nadirs such as the Youngbloods pep-squadding, “C’mon people now, smile on your brother/ Everybody get together, we gotta love one another right now.” That’s the crypto-fascist, all-citizens-must-be-happy side of utopia Björk was talking about.

Bono has said he was inspired lyrically by advice he was given by the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly, to “write as if you’re dead,” but on the evidence of this album I think he’s taken it wrong: It doesn’t mean to sum up, to make every song a last will and testament, but to gaze on the human struggle with some measure of cool clarity like a tree standing in water, and not to try to ingratiate yourself to the listener. It’s not a mode that comes naturally to U2. Especially after the general outrage the band endured when it deposited Songs of Innocence onto half the world’s nonconsenting computers in 2014, they’ve come back with far too much to prove. As critic Joe Gross has pointed out, it’s obvious even in the overwrought song titles (an underrated skill the band used to excel at). On this album, U2 just can’t stop U2-ing.

For those who love U2 when it’s U2-ing, that may be good news, but these songs don’t so much draw the listener in as hunt the listener down. There’s breathing space in the opening “Love Is All We Have Left,” with its Philip Glass–like pulse and Bono in a quizzical duet with a vocoder, and in the closing “13,” an insightful, affecting recasting of the previous album’s “Song for Someone.” But sandwiched in between is less joy-as-resistance than joy that’s supposed to be irresistible. Most of the songs have their moments, but you can hear all the effort that’s gone into optimizing them for arena yell-alongs—as if the band’s only real faith is that heaven is a place in the floor seats at a U2 show.

It’s tempting to label the dichotomy between U2’s and Björk’s excursions into utopianism: masculine versus feminine, perhaps, or heteronormative versus nonbinary (a realm of identity that Arca explores in some of his own work). It could be U2’s Christian soft-evangelism as opposed to Björk’s Nordic animism. It may be U2’s unwillingness to let go of the 20th-century dogma of rock ’n’ roll, and its insular nuclear-band-family structure, in comparison with Björk’s continual eagerness to explore new sounds and engage new collaborators. But perhaps more crucial is her willingness to giddily abandon the familiar, to risk a forbidding strangeness if that’s where her creative path meanders, while U2 lumbers under its own history, the burden of its loyalty to the idea of itself. Björk is all journey, all process, and U2 is all outcome, all destination. Together their music reminds us of what the previous century proved, that the surest way never to reach utopia is to be certain you already know what it should look like.

https://slate.com/arts/2017/12/bjork-and-u2s-new-utopian-albums-reviewed.html
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Irvine511 said:
i enjoyed this article as well, and i think it gets to SOE's fundamental weaknesses. it's also very thoughtful.
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As a fan of both artists, I definitely appreciated that article a lot. It makes some interesting points and you can tell the writer, at least, took his time to listen to both albums. An interesting comparison and not one I thought a reviewer would make necessarily.

Although the reception to Bjork's latest album is more positive, it's interesting reading some of the comments reacting to it. It seems she lost a number of fans after Vespertine (or maybe around Medulla), and the consensus on this album is that it's either too weird or not weird enough (as I saw one comment point out). You can't satisfy everyone obviously, albeit Bjork always follows the beat of her own drum and her music while challenging (more increasingly so too), is always worth a try in my book. And of course, it's wonderful to have artists like her out there.
 
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dk42 said:
As a fan of both artists, I definitely appreciated that article a lot. It makes some interesting points and you can tell the writer, at least, took his time to listen to both albums. An interesting comparison and not one I thought a reviewer would make necessarily.
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It doesn’t seem like a fair match up, an Icelandic art world pixie vs global stadium giants, but at least it notices their common theme, as well as acknowledge U2’s genuinely artistic ambitions, and uses their differences to dig deeper into both albums.
 
ChurchBay said:
When I was younger it was U2's knack of nailing that big song that could reverberate and connect emotionally that got me into them. No band in the world has ever done it better and no band will never better it.

Songs of Experience is big sounds for big themes by the band that perfected it, something I thought they had long lost the ability to do. Attempts at providing this kind of album failed miserably on Songs of Innocence and No Line On The Horizon but they've rediscovered that ability that they lost halfway through How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.

And they should make no apology for it. People saying they should be more restrained as they were on Zooropa or Pop but I think the big songs really work on this album. The Little Things, Red Flag Day and Lights of Home are all triumphs in that category. They are all great songs not just because they're big but because fundamentally, when you strip back the bombast,

It is one of the toughest things in music, trying to create that song which connects to the person at the farthest point from the stage. Noel Gallagher could do it with ease, Paul McCartney wrote these songs in his sleep and U2 perfected it.

U2 can either sit back and allow lesser impersonations of them to run away with and continue bastardising what should be one of the most difficult tasks in music - a song that reverberates and invigorates thousands of people at one time. Or they can show to the world (as they've done countless times in their career) what it really takes to provide those sort of genuine communal moments without ever needing the cynical ploys of pyrotechnics and fancy flashy wrist band gimmicks to cover up for their lack of substance (see Coldplay).

If not then I suppose we should all submit and just stand around watching our favourite acts like idle bores as half the cunts who proclaim themselves as musically intellectual do.
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They know what they're good at and they did it again with this album. But the reviewers are criticizing them for doing just that. You know, for being U2. I'd rather hear criticisms of the bands that try to be U2, aren't, and typically do it poorly anyway.
 
Alphorn said:
They know what they're good at and they did it again with this album. But the reviewers are criticizing them for doing just that. You know, for being U2. I'd rather hear criticisms of the bands that try to be U2, aren't, and typically do it poorly anyway.
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Yea....this pisses me off. And what pisses me off even more is when they accuse U2 of trying to sound like artists that are clearly using the U2 playbook (e.g., Coldplay). You know what I like to do when I get pissed off? Listen to U2 being U2.
 
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/u2-relight-their-unforgettable-fire-36391592.html

U2 relight their unforgettable fire
U2 have, in a sense, gone away and dreamed it up all over again with their new album Songs Of Experience

Barry Egan
Barry Egan
December 11 2017 2:30 AM

Bono works in mysterious ways. But you have to admire him, however pompously evangelical and self-rewardingly messianic he gets on occasion, for following his heart most of the time.
In January, 1990 the U2 lead singer was at home in Killiney watching the television: on it, 100,000 Iraq troops went to their deaths as Baghdad lit up like a Christmas tree. Bono could not believe his ears when he heard the first US pilot return from Kuwait to tell the waiting press that "turning Baghdad into a car park was very realistic".

At that moment U2's Zoo TV was brought screaming into the world. "It was beyond being taken seriously," Bono told me in 1992. "I understood, for instance, the humour of Picasso after the Spanish Civil war, Guernica - the humour as well as the fright of it - and how he never painted human beings again," Bono said in reference to Picasso's painting which the artist created in June 1937 in reaction to the bombing of Guernica by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian bomber-planes at the request of Franco. "You know, they were always going to be caricatures. They were always going to be bloodless people. Surrealism," Bono added, "made sense to me as a response."

Twenty-five years on, Bono and his little band from the northside of Dublin appear to have taken on a form of personal surrealism as their response to the world and their place in it in 2017. Everything is a caricature after Trump got elected and the UK voted to withdraw from the European Union. Everything changed, too, when Bono nearly died. (In the liner notes of the new U2 album Songs Of Experience, Bono writes: "Last winter I was on the receiving end of a shock to the system, a shock that left me clinging on to my own life.")

Songs Of Experience is another U2 reawakening, though not remotely as radical as 1987's The Joshua Tree and 1991's Achtung! Baby. To me, this, the band's 14th studio album, is their best set of recordings since the aforesaid Achtung! Baby all those years ago. What was supposed to be the companion to 2014's Songs of Innocence album is far better for having the creative gestation period of almost four years. Where Songs Of Innocence was an album about childhood, Songs Of Experience is a more grown-up record: about death and the power of love. Indeed the opening track Love Is All We Have Left has touches of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's song of that name with Bono reborn as Bono Iver singing about immortality and death:

'Now you're at the other end of the telescope/
Seven billion stars in her eyes/

So many stars/
So many ways of seeing/

Hey, this is no time not to be alive.' This album is U2 surveying America much differently to The Joshua Tree. "For refugees like you and me/a country to receive us/Will you be my sanctuary/Refu-Jesus!" he sings on American Soul. "Statues fall, democracy is flat on its back, Jack," Bono raps on The Blackout.

To their detractors, contributors like Kendrick Lamar on American Soul and Haim on Lights of Home (to say nothing of the Arcade Fire-improv of Get Out of Your Own Way, or as Classic Rock said in its review, "dreary sub-Coldplay trundlers like Summer Of Love and Bryan Adams-style soft-rockers like You're The Best Thing About Me) are, to quote Pitchfork, "the shameless effort of four men in their late 50s to muster a contemporary, youthful sound". That is a bit over the top, frankly, and even more frankly, plain wrong.

Bono once declared on stage that the band had to "go away and dream it all up again". I think, in a sense, U2 have done that on Songs Of Experience. "When you think you're done," Bono sings on Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way, "you've just begun." You wonder have U2 just begun and, if so, where they can take it next. In any event, U2 have relit their (unforgettable) fire.
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U2 - Songs Of Experience | Reviews | Clash Magazine

Good review:

U2 - Songs Of Experience
Irish giants find fresh solace on a creative return...
LUKE WINSTANLEY REVIEWS 12 · 12 · 2017

'Songs Of Experience'

In the 2016 mockumentary comedy Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, written by and starring The Lonely Island, a Justin Bieber-style mega buffoon named Conner4Real agrees a ludicrous deal with an electrical appliances company to upload his new album onto their products. The result, to the annoyance of the general public, many of whom are not even fans of his, is that they hear the singer's music every time someone opens a refrigerator door. The scene was clearly a well projected jab, and a very funny one we must add, at U2 and the disastrous release of their much maligned 2014 record, ‘Songs Of Innocence’. Arriving preloaded onto iPhones worldwide, it caused an almost unprecedented amount of controversy and seething darts of vitriolic rage were thrown the band’s way, sparking endless debates about privacy in the digital age.

To understand how the band reached this point, you have to go back almost a decade. At the beginning of the noughties they had masterminded a comeback that brought them immense commercial success once again after a long period of experimentation and two records that marked a deliberate shift to a more minimal songwriting approach. However, despite 2000’s ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’ and 2004’s ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’ being lauded critically — the former is now generally considered one of their finest — this success was followed in 2009 by the misfiring ‘No Line On The Horizon’. Although it contained moments of genuine beauty (‘Moment Of Surrender’ and ‘Breathe’ are just two perennially undervalued examples), the band sounded a little lost, grappling with creating an experimental magnum opus while attempting to somehow maintain their commercial appeal.

Incidentally, and maybe due to a fear of failure or paranoia they would become something of an irrelevance, ‘Songs Of Innocence’ was painfully safe and at times, felt pretty aimless. Bono’s pointed lyrics helped illuminate a handful of tracks but in truth these were the only aspects of the album to really savour. Three years later and its successor ‘Songs Of Experience’ feels less of a companion piece and more like the record they were meant to make in the first place. What separates the pair, despite sharing many thematic and musical similarities, is the band's greater appreciation for dynamics and restraint, appearing to have rediscovered their identity in the process. The production, which was extremely cluttered and disappointing last time around — especially with someone as esteemed as Danger Mouse at the helm — is also less of an issue, instead imbuing a sleekness and sense of modernity.

This is typified by the opening track ‘Love Is All We Have Left’ which, apart from some questionable use of autotune, is wonderfully understated, layered in very little but a glistening wash of synthesisers. ‘The Little Things That Give You Away’ is the sort of slow building, crystalline gem the band haven’t really conceived since ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’ and there are some lovely, swaying shifts in tempo.

One of the biggest criticisms of their previous two releases was that they were for the most part, rather hollow emotionally and it appears to be something the four piece have now decided to address. That’s not to say there’s a lack of variation, take ‘Red Flag Day’ and its superb, spiky groove or the foreboding strings that break out on ‘Summer Of Love’ for example.

Many were surprised after Kendrick Lamar chose to work with U2 on 'XXX', one of the many highlights from his astounding fourth album ‘DAMN.’ which was released earlier this year. The result was a multi layered mini masterpiece, examining with great depth, the idea of America not as a country, but as a concept. The song from which the excerpt was taken features here in the way of ‘American Soul’ but whereas Kendrick’s ‘XXX’ was undercut with fractured piano chords and a steady trip-hop beat, the former reveals itself to be something quite different. A huge ‘Vertigo' style rocker, it certainly lacks the nuance of the version which appeared on ‘DAMN.’ but its outrageously positive vision of America (“You and I are rock and roll!”) fused with crunching, metallic riffs is undoubtedly still thrilling.

Their relationship with the U.S. has always been a complex and paradoxical one — this is, after all, the same band who penned ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’. Of course, ‘The Blackout’ is less scathing. Although possibly alluding to and reflecting Bono’s anxieties surrounding the relevance of his band in the 21st Century (“A dinosaur wonders why it still walks the earth”), in general, it seems to be touching on the reactionary figures or movements that have prospered in the current political climate. Sonically, it’s the closest they’ve come to successfully recreating the delightfully ridiculous, alternative rock of the Zoo TV era.

The fact that the lyrics elsewhere are not always particularly explicit in their subject matter may be one of the record’s few downfalls. Nonetheless, there are still some puzzling decisions. The incorporation of a riff from a HAIM track on ‘Lights Of Home’ feels somewhat lazy and crass as does the clunky, predictable guitar rock that permeates the verses of ‘You’re The Best Thing About Me’.

U2 have spent the last decade or so drifting, seemingly bereft of inspiration. ‘Songs Of Experience’ doesn’t have the sublime depth of ‘The Joshua Tree’ nor the jagged post modern edge of ‘Achtung Baby’ or ‘Zooropa' and it would be ludicrous and rather churlish to suggest so. It may not even share the same ambition as ‘No Line On The Horizon’ however, it’s an undeniable improvement on their two misfiring predecessors, marking this collection as their most cohesive and heartfelt in almost 15 years. Perhaps for the first time in their long and illustrious career, U2 are content with simply being themselves and right now, that appears to be more than enough.
7/10
Words: Luke Winstanley
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CosmoKramer said:
I have read so many more positive reviews than negative and yet when you go to a site like Metacritic those reviews are not there but the hamburglers review is......He is the clear outlier of all reviews but I’m told I need to take his review as serious as the music critic for the NY Or LA Times.
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I told you all...... Metacritic is biased. Shame on them.
 
simran said:
U2’s new album is an optimistic plea to a new generation
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U2’s new album is an optimistic plea to a new generation

The famed Irish band’s new album tackles big themes with an urgent and energetic sound
By Eamon Martin

Ask any college student what they think of U2, and if they even know who you’re talking about, you’re likely to hear all about their 2014 release debacle for “Songs of Innocence.” Released for free to hundreds of millions of ITunes users, the band was scathed on social media for an invasion of privacy due to the automatic placement of the album in people’s libraries. Since then, the band has attempted to claw its way back to popular relevance, but it has not been a simple path. Despite having successful supporting tours for the 2014 release and for the 30-year anniversary of “The Joshua Tree,” the band hasn’t released new music since and Bono has faced several health scares.

But on Dec. 1t, that all changed with the band’s release of Songs of Experience.” The album is a return to form for the Irish rockers, not only in terms of its traditional release strategy, but also in the musical heights the album takes its audience. “Songs of Experience” is a magical album that captivates with an energy, passion and a swagger not seen from U2 in some time.

Songs of Experience opens into a dark and brooding “Love is All we Have Left.” With its mixture of synths, a slower and deep vocal performance from Bono, and a perfectly used auto tune, the song immediately sets the mood for the rest of album. Haim, a band of LA pop rock sisters, join the band for “Lights of Home,” and the band grooves confidently with a traditional rock sound. This continues through the next several titles (“You’re the Best Thing About Me,” “Get Out Of Your Own Way” and “American Soul”). The latter two feature a captivating intermission led by a preaching Kendrick Lamar, while the former chimes along but fails to impress significantly.

Beginning with “Summer of Love,” however, the band really begins to hit their stride. Summer is carried by an addicting guitar from Edge, and a sublime bass from Adam Clayton, with Bono painting a picture of the Syrian refugee crisis. “Red Flag Day”, has all the workings of a west-coast punk classic, something I never imagined I’d hear from a 41-year-old band. “The Showman (Little More Better)” has similar energy and punch, but the real standout of the middle portion of the album is “The Little Things That Give You Away.” In the song, Bono is seemingly speaking to a younger version of himself, and in the middle of a full blown crisis over identity and relevance. This is the work of a front man, and a band, that knows its end may soon be here.

While many of the songs on this album have political and social undertones, few wear them on their sleeve as much as the dark and apocalyptic “The Blackout.” The song sounds like a cross between disco and metal. The energy of the album after a few slow tracks.once again grounds the work of the band in a current-day political climate, focusing the theme of the album yet again on the state of democracy.

This fosters the perfect foundation for the grand finale of the album, including the next song, “Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way.” The clear standout of the album, the song was written as a letter to Bono’s children. The song is easily one of the band's best anthems since “City of Blinding Lights” and “Beautiful Day,” and is nearly perfectly “feel good” without coming across as cheesy. “13 (There is a Light)” brings the album full circle, ending in a moody and earnest ballad. Like its predecessor, 13 is a song written to younger audience, not so much in terms of its melody, but in its message. The ballad is an aching tale for its listener to believe in the light of hope, in spite of the darkness that all too often gathers around it.

Ultimately, this album is so much more than a collection of individual letters and songs. Instead, the album is a letter to all of us, and more specifically, our generation, encouraging us to keep believing. Considering these past two years, it’s not surprising that so many have relinquished their optimism. In fact, in our world today, it seems that all we may have are love and an ever decreasing reserve of hope. But U2 makes it clear: love and hope are greater than anything that could ever wish to extinguish them.The world may be dark and hopeless sometimes, but we don’t have to be.

music@theeagleonline.com
 
Wish those bastards at Metacritic would include some more of the positive ones. Anything less than 70 is a disgrace !. Convinced they are U2 haters. Can think of at least 10 bonafide newspaper reviews that have been good or even great that are not logged & counted.
 
jakehu said:
Wish those bastards at Metacritic would include some more of the positive ones. Anything less than 70 is a disgrace !. Convinced they are U2 haters. Can think of at least 10 bonafide newspaper reviews that have been good or even great that are not logged & counted.
Click to expand...
I mean... they have a system that they use for every single album, regardless of artist

You can argue that the system should be tweaked, but to say they are impartial towards a specific artist? That's just being a silly goose.
 
Those publications likely just aren’t included in Metacritic’s formula for whatever reason. I doubt it’s exclusive to U2. If a publication isn’t there for the review of SoE, I don’t think they are there for any reviews.
 
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