songs of experience would be an amazing album if they, ya know, got rid of the first couple of singles
New Album Discussion 1 - Songs of..... - Unreasonable guitar album
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Achtung Ya'll
War Child
SoI Bad. SoE Good. SoS Dear Lord Help Me Let's Forget This Exists.
mikal
Blue Crack Addict
SOI is incredible.
Hewson
Blue Crack Supplier
SOI > SOE for sure.
djerdap
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
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They're both awful.
No offense.
I still enjoy The Troubles and Sleep Like a Baby Tonight though.
No offense.
I still enjoy The Troubles and Sleep Like a Baby Tonight though.
mikal
Blue Crack Addict
Compared to their 80's and 90's output, for sure. But I would go as far as saying that other songs like Every Breaking Wave, Volcano, Raised By Wolves, Cedarwood Road, and Reach Around are all pretty good when measuring the rest of the post 90's catalog.
The only songs post HTDAAB that reach the heights of those mentioned above for me are NLOTH, MOS, Fez-Being Porn, Little Things, and Lights Of Home (Strings version).
mikal
Blue Crack Addict
Actually, to piggy back off of my last post, I'm always curious how others here separate U2's catalog. I've always grouped them by separating the 80's/90's and then everything else after.
BUT...recently, I started to group ATYCLB and HTDAAB in the first grouping. Even though there are parts of the latter 2 albums that are trash, in retrospect, I've started to look at those two as part of the larger picture of where U2 was at their creative heights and not overthinking/questioning themselves.
I think NLOTH was the true start of the decline for the band and they have never recovered from an artistic standpoint in which they start with an idea, but are incapable of allowing themselves to fully commit to it, causing delays and poor single choices and choppy albums full of several ideas/themes.
You could potentially even point to HTDAAB as the start of their decline, but they had some huge singles that really cemented their stature at the time. I have my complaints about that album and their were signs of the second guessing already starting to take place but it didn't really rear its ugly head until NLOTH.
This is why I really have zero interest in another U2 album. I'd rather have 1 off singles or EP's at this point. And maybe they should have gone that route much earlier.
BUT...recently, I started to group ATYCLB and HTDAAB in the first grouping. Even though there are parts of the latter 2 albums that are trash, in retrospect, I've started to look at those two as part of the larger picture of where U2 was at their creative heights and not overthinking/questioning themselves.
I think NLOTH was the true start of the decline for the band and they have never recovered from an artistic standpoint in which they start with an idea, but are incapable of allowing themselves to fully commit to it, causing delays and poor single choices and choppy albums full of several ideas/themes.
You could potentially even point to HTDAAB as the start of their decline, but they had some huge singles that really cemented their stature at the time. I have my complaints about that album and their were signs of the second guessing already starting to take place but it didn't really rear its ugly head until NLOTH.
This is why I really have zero interest in another U2 album. I'd rather have 1 off singles or EP's at this point. And maybe they should have gone that route much earlier.
I feel like U2s decline coincides with Edge’s lack of “edge” in guitar riffs / playing.
NLOTH had a few moments here and there. SOI meh (see below) and SOE has nothing memorable
Volcano and Reach prob two of his better efforts in the Song Of era.
It’s such shame cause he’s a genius with how simplistic his playing is and the effects. Now i feel like he’s hit George Harrison territory where i honestly can’t even tell he’s playing on the song haha. My view of course….
NLOTH had a few moments here and there. SOI meh (see below) and SOE has nothing memorable
Volcano and Reach prob two of his better efforts in the Song Of era.
It’s such shame cause he’s a genius with how simplistic his playing is and the effects. Now i feel like he’s hit George Harrison territory where i honestly can’t even tell he’s playing on the song haha. My view of course….
djerdap
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
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With a few exceptions, Edge's playing has been for me quite uninspring and unremarkable ever since All That You Can't Leave Behind.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet was the last U2 song I considered to be great.
But they're still a killer live band, and they have 10 very good to great albums (I'm including Passengers), which is one of the highest numbers I can think of among any of the bands I love.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet was the last U2 song I considered to be great.
But they're still a killer live band, and they have 10 very good to great albums (I'm including Passengers), which is one of the highest numbers I can think of among any of the bands I love.
I think All That You Can't Leave Behind was their last truly great album. I love everything about that album, being very cohesive and focused in its themes and music. Atomic Bomb in hindsight is where the decline starts. It could and should have just been a blip ala Rattle & Hum because there's no denying that their smash hit songwriting abilities were still at their peak. The album is scatterbrained and inconsistent - nothing terrible on that album but a good batch of them are merely b-side material.
Unfortunately, that scatterbrained and inconsistent approach kills every album from here on in. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Atomic Bomb is where the habit of 'too many cooks' - i.e. a wide variety of producers - starts to take hold. This ensures every album loses its sonic and lyrical focus.
How a purely led Eno/Lanois collaboration on No Line would have sounded is the biggest 'what if' here. The meditative and sombre atmospheres conjured up in some of these songs were fantastic (Cedars, White As Snow) and what 'big' tunes they had at least contained pulsating Edge soundscapes (Magnificent, No Line). Once Lillywhite and, god forbid, Will.I.Am are brought on board to commercialise and water down the album is when it went wrong. Case in point being Breathe - something which Eno claims had more exotic production and was his 'favourite U2 song' was turned into a bland and cliched 'rawk' music (another habit seen with Miracle, American Soul, Atomic City). It's a shame because underneath that beige guitars, unlike the aforementioned songs, Breathe is actually very good song, but just a poor recording.
I just wish they'd stick with one or two producers and see it through.
Unfortunately, that scatterbrained and inconsistent approach kills every album from here on in. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Atomic Bomb is where the habit of 'too many cooks' - i.e. a wide variety of producers - starts to take hold. This ensures every album loses its sonic and lyrical focus.
How a purely led Eno/Lanois collaboration on No Line would have sounded is the biggest 'what if' here. The meditative and sombre atmospheres conjured up in some of these songs were fantastic (Cedars, White As Snow) and what 'big' tunes they had at least contained pulsating Edge soundscapes (Magnificent, No Line). Once Lillywhite and, god forbid, Will.I.Am are brought on board to commercialise and water down the album is when it went wrong. Case in point being Breathe - something which Eno claims had more exotic production and was his 'favourite U2 song' was turned into a bland and cliched 'rawk' music (another habit seen with Miracle, American Soul, Atomic City). It's a shame because underneath that beige guitars, unlike the aforementioned songs, Breathe is actually very good song, but just a poor recording.
I just wish they'd stick with one or two producers and see it through.
TinKnight
Refugee
I cannot get behind any implied TLTTGYA slander
I think little things is a good song. But i feel like it’s missing something….more verses / another chorus…..or some instrumental parts to make it a little longer before the big ending.
I don’t really know. Guess I’m left wanting a little more out of it
I don’t really know. Guess I’m left wanting a little more out of it
Salome
you are what you is
Boy up and until Rattle & Hum is all driven by inspiration and energy.
Everything after, except maybe Zooropa and that would also have been a dead end to pursue further rather quickly, is still at times inspired but also pretty labored.
It's no coincidence 3 Achtung songs were built out of the same guitar riff. POP was at the same time overproduced and needed another year of work. ATYCLB is equal parts inspired and calculated. Bomb is more calculated than inspired. No Line is heavily labored but saved by enough inspiration. SOI is a bit like POP, but with better songs. SOE is a bit like Bomb.
It says a lot about the band that even though all of that, there is not a bad album there and most of these albums would be highlights in other bands' careers.
Everything after, except maybe Zooropa and that would also have been a dead end to pursue further rather quickly, is still at times inspired but also pretty labored.
It's no coincidence 3 Achtung songs were built out of the same guitar riff. POP was at the same time overproduced and needed another year of work. ATYCLB is equal parts inspired and calculated. Bomb is more calculated than inspired. No Line is heavily labored but saved by enough inspiration. SOI is a bit like POP, but with better songs. SOE is a bit like Bomb.
It says a lot about the band that even though all of that, there is not a bad album there and most of these albums would be highlights in other bands' careers.
OP
OP
dan_smee
ONE love, blood, life
Why would we be offended? It’s your take, that’s fine. I’m not so insecure that I feel as though everyone has to agree with me, but don’t assume everyone else is so insecure that you having that opinion affects them at all.
djerdap
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
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That is quite an overreaction to a throwaway, slightly facetious line.
Registered Dude
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Stop (the poverty)
TinKnight
Refugee
hoooooooly shit I forgot about Stop (the Poverty).
i hear it's going to be the lead single off of Solar.
TinKnight
Refugee
Is that before or after Tightrope comes out?
mikal
Blue Crack Addict
Expect Nothing
Hewson
Blue Crack Supplier
Depends on how long the Volcano tour runs and how long it takes Willie to design the volcano shaped stage.
DomCobb
Acrobat
I think there is a dividing line for the band - the approach has been a bit different starting with the new millennium. Up to and including Pop, there's a clear drive in regards to sonic exploration, with each album needing to have a different and new sound to justify its existence. I don't fully buy into the arguments that U2 lost all of their edge and just put out personality-less stereotypical "U2" albums ever since. I mean ATYCLB has some deceptively complicated production, and you'd never mistake any songs from that for being off The Joshua Tree. But I do think this element of the band has been on a decline, to the point of flattening out at this point. I think generally the reason for this (beyond chasing relevance) is not committing to just one or two producers for their records, and instead cycling through rounds of producers and cobbling together albums that sonically are a bit patchwork, and at times somewhat plain.
That said... overall I don't think this really tracks with the overall quality of the albums. I don't agree with any critiques of U2 being in decline, years away from their last great album or anything like that. Did they have a peak a few decades ago they will never touch again? Yeah, of course. But that doesn't mean that they're decades past good work. I would argue that SOI and SOE are on par with a number of their 80s and 90s albums. If I were to rank their discography, there'd be very little correlation to when the albums came out.
That said... overall I don't think this really tracks with the overall quality of the albums. I don't agree with any critiques of U2 being in decline, years away from their last great album or anything like that. Did they have a peak a few decades ago they will never touch again? Yeah, of course. But that doesn't mean that they're decades past good work. I would argue that SOI and SOE are on par with a number of their 80s and 90s albums. If I were to rank their discography, there'd be very little correlation to when the albums came out.
I have a different take.
My take is that the band has always wanted to be a big and popular band and every change in sound was done in the interest of staying ahead of the curve so that they could always sound fresh in comparison to other popular artists at the time.
Eventually you run into a point where that doesn't work anymore, because you're both popular and old.
My take is that the band has always wanted to be a big and popular band and every change in sound was done in the interest of staying ahead of the curve so that they could always sound fresh in comparison to other popular artists at the time.
Eventually you run into a point where that doesn't work anymore, because you're both popular and old.
DomCobb
Acrobat
And I don’t disagree with any of that to be honest. And at the end of the day the motivation behind it doesn’t really matter one way or another if it works.
I just feel there’s a demarcation point where they either got worse at the chasing or put less effort in. ATYCLB feels like a switch from being ahead of the curve to behind it for me personally. Or at the very least I would say the demarcation point is how successful they were at sounding fresh (again, regardless of quality otherwise).
And yes perhaps the simple reason for it was that they had nowhere else to go. Although you can see interesting avenues not gone down on their last few albums.
TinKnight
Refugee
they peaked with boy and are lazy
ATYCLB originally was the start of a decline for me because how dare they stray away from the experimental perfection of POP and the two albums that preceded. The irony being 2001 was when I really solidified my fandom and "discovered" them. I've since come around on that album because, as someone else said, there's a complexity of production that's deceptively simple-sounding and easy to dismiss given it's an album striving to be full of singles and pop songs. It's certainly not back-to-basics, despite it kind of being billed as such and yeah, the big lead-off single had Edge's signature jangly guitar, but it wasn't like anything else they or others had done.
It was really HTDAAB that felt like a shift had taken place and my opinion of it is about the same as when it was released. It felt like a "best of" album, but with original songs. It seems like they threw everything they had done before into a pot and hoped something shiny and new would come out of the kitchen if they cooked it long enough. It certainly paid off for them with a few huge singles, but it's the first album that doesn't have an identity. At the time, I chalked it up to them having to write in-between Bono's politicking efforts. Now I just feel like it was a sign of not being able to commit to one full idea and sonic texture anymore, as was stated before, and they never really got it back since. SOI is the closest, in my view, but I realize that's debatable. 2004 was when we entered the era of U2 being a great songs band instead of a great albums band.
It was really HTDAAB that felt like a shift had taken place and my opinion of it is about the same as when it was released. It felt like a "best of" album, but with original songs. It seems like they threw everything they had done before into a pot and hoped something shiny and new would come out of the kitchen if they cooked it long enough. It certainly paid off for them with a few huge singles, but it's the first album that doesn't have an identity. At the time, I chalked it up to them having to write in-between Bono's politicking efforts. Now I just feel like it was a sign of not being able to commit to one full idea and sonic texture anymore, as was stated before, and they never really got it back since. SOI is the closest, in my view, but I realize that's debatable. 2004 was when we entered the era of U2 being a great songs band instead of a great albums band.
But that's where I fully disagree.
In the late 80s big hair bands started dominating, so U2 lost the mullets and became very serious.
In the early 90s grunge was exploding, so U2 shifted to be less serious and have a more industrial sound.
When they started Pop we were leaving grunge and getting very light, pop punk and, like, a post grunge mishmosh of whatever the heck we want to call it. U2 went electronic-lite.
The late 90s and early 2000s was full of a lot of fake, plastic sounding music. Nu metal, boy bands, electronics, etc. U2 returned to a more earnest, classic coke sound.
the early 2000s shift was no less calculated than the early 90s shift. Different styles, but same reasoning.
Mid 2000s was a bit of a double-down. The music industry was in a strange place. But their big shift was to be the first of the major acts to really embrace new media and downloads vs physical albums with the apple deal. They again stayed one step ahead and were as big as ever.
Where it broke was on No Line - where the band set out to do the same thing - morph to stay ahead of the curve. But they got cold feet and stripped out a lot of what would have made No Line stand out.
But at that point they had eclipsed where they were even in the mid 90s and grown to a place where even a bad album couldn't stop a huge tour.
SOI and SOE featured more of the same. They tried to shift by going with a producer with a very unique sound in Danger Mouse, but again got cold feet and watered it down (and tried to double back with apple to disastrous results).
But live they were still as big a draw as there was in the world. Down from the heights of 360, but still a top 2 global touring act.
So they got themselves caught in this space where they were huge and old and past the point where anyone really gave a crap about new music other than hardcore fans - but they couldn't really accept that and kept watering down their releases to appeal to the masses, which doesn't work when you're old.
They want to still be a band that makes new music that matters, which is admirable, but have reached a point where the olds just want the hits and he youngs don't give a shit.
Every major, long running act goes through it. You either accept that you're old and deal, or you deny it and you try to keep on keeping on, which leads to failure.
I would argue that their initial instincts going into No Line and going into the SONGS OF period were correct, but they lost their sack and couldn't follow through because they got too caught up in caring what the youngs thought, and the desire to remain huge with their new releases instead of just accepting who they were.
I'm done rambling now.
I guess my TL: dr is this - I disagree with the idea that they used to let the creative drive he commerce until post 2000.
They ALWAYS let the commerce drive the creative. It just didn't work as well as things went on because they got too old and big.
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But Bono is thin now! vest.jpg, etc.
lazarus
Blue Crack Supplier
I’ll repeat what I say anytime the early 2000s run comes up: Eno’s mandate to spend more time writing and less time recording is what downgrades ATYCLB. Sure, it has more sonic unity than the next two albums, but the tracks are simply undercooked and not performed as great as they could have been. As said above, HTDAAB may sound like a scattershot greatest hits, but the songs are at least developed better in the recordings for the most part.
Sadly, this focus on writing was intensified even further with the disastrous input of Rick Rubin, and all these years later we still hear Bono going on and on about this “topline” bullshit. What set U2 apart was never the songwriting; it was the unique studio alchemy the band has when “finding” the songs, their passion and conviction, and the emotional power of the live shows that can reach people even in the largest venues. So this obsession with crafting the perfect pop song on paper plus their Too Many Cooks indecisiveness on producers and sound is what made the last three albums such frustrating listens, despite the moments of greatness.
There’s no reason to expect any change in this direction. The next album will have some great tracks, some solid ones, and some cringe-inducing ones. The bitter nostalgia junkies here will think the whole thing is trash, the simps will claim the whole thing is great, and the rest of us will take what we can get.
Sadly, this focus on writing was intensified even further with the disastrous input of Rick Rubin, and all these years later we still hear Bono going on and on about this “topline” bullshit. What set U2 apart was never the songwriting; it was the unique studio alchemy the band has when “finding” the songs, their passion and conviction, and the emotional power of the live shows that can reach people even in the largest venues. So this obsession with crafting the perfect pop song on paper plus their Too Many Cooks indecisiveness on producers and sound is what made the last three albums such frustrating listens, despite the moments of greatness.
There’s no reason to expect any change in this direction. The next album will have some great tracks, some solid ones, and some cringe-inducing ones. The bitter nostalgia junkies here will think the whole thing is trash, the simps will claim the whole thing is great, and the rest of us will take what we can get.
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