“Love is evolution’s very best day”: U2’s Still-Growing Musical Mastery

By Tracey Hackett, Editor

March 18, 2009

Charles Darwin might call it “survival of the fittest,” but perhaps the best phrase in terms of rock ‘n’ roll is “staying power.”

Regardless of how you describe it, U2′s recently released 12^th studio album, No Line on the Horizon, is an evolution of sight and sound that embodies masterful musical techniques the renowned Irish band have been adapting since the early 1990s.

The modern evolution of U2 began with the late 1991 release of Achtung Baby, which is widely accepted by fans and critics alike as a complete reinvention of the band from the previous decade. What makes Achtung Baby divergent is the level of exoticism and complexity it exhibited in songs like “Mysterious Ways” and “The Fly.” Until now, none of U2′s other recordings have explored those characteristics to the same depth. NLOTH not only returns to those qualities, however, but it coaxes them to near natural selection perfection.

Shortly after Achtung Baby’s release, Bono said, “I certainly think this record… is a new start and things move in shifts. I mean, there’s another record that belongs with this, just as Rattle and Hum belonged with The Joshua Tree. I know that record, I can hear it in my head already.”

While he was likely making a specific reference to Zooropa, the atmospheric and experimental follow-up to Achtung Baby, he could just as easily have been speaking prophetically in many ways about NLOTH. The North African influence that first found its way into the band’s sound in “Mysterious Ways,” for example, is explored today in the foreign-sounding audio loops of songs like “Fez-Being Born.” The feminine image that is also so clear in “Mysterious Ways” is mirrored in the new recording’s title track and in “Get On Your Boots,” its first song to be released as a single. And the bittersweet anonymity that rang out then on songs like “One” and “So Cruel” is reflected today on “Moment of Surrender,” perhaps the most singularly haunting and soul-searing ballad on the current recording.

Achtung Baby was also U2′s first album to explore character songs like “The Fly” that gave rise to Bono’s direct foray into the theatrical exploration of alter egos in the band’s live performances, and that kind of song has a significant presence in the third-person lyrics featured in NLOTH too. The track “White as Snow” explores a dying soldier’s final thoughts, “Cedars of Lebanon” is sung through the jaded perspective of an international journalist for whom the horrors of war and poverty are mundane, everyday events, and “Unknown Caller” likely explores the suicidal tendencies of a drug addict who’s lost all hope of recovery. While drugs, death and destruction have long been common themes of U2 songs, perhaps none of the tracks on NLOTH hint as strongly at the possibility of introducing a new alter ego for the 21^st century as the fast-paced, double-talking, used car salesman-quality lyrics in the opening of the song “Breathe.” During U2′s weeklong stint on the David Letterman Show, “Breathe” was the first track the band performed, but it was delivered in a straightforward manner, without even a hint of alter egos. So U2 may have made a conscious decision to exclude further exploration of theatrical characters for now, even though NLOTH appears to be the kind of album that would welcome it and even though Bono has been spotted wearing thick, black eyeliner multiple times in the weeks leading up to the album’s release.

With or without alter egos, however, NLOTH has enough other evolutionary and experimental characteristics to give it relevance and prominence that prevent it from sounding stagnant. Just as U2′s modern evolution continued with the ambiance and ethereal sounds of Zooropa, for instance, the band further explores those same qualities today. They’re there in an other worldly beauty on songs like “Moment of Surrender” and perhaps most clearly in the repetitious let me in the sound loop of “Fez-Being Born.” Ambiance is easily created in many of the songs with lyrics that rely on third-person narrative, and just as U2 experimented with the cross-genre sound of Johnny Cash’s voice on Zooropa’s final track, “The Wanderer,” close listeners of NLOTH might be justified in believing that if the man in black were still alive today, his voice would lend another complex layer to the pithiness of “White as Snow.”

In spite of the song’s title, however, it is anything but devoid of color. “White as Snow” is perhaps the deepest, if not darkest, song on the recording. In that respect, it could best be compared to the lyrics from Pop, the album that followed Zooropa and on which U2 reached its darkest and most multi-layered depths. With songs like “Wake Up Dead Man” and “Last Night on Earth” packaged in the band’s most graphically colorful album sleeve, however, some fans and critics were unprepared for the depth and darkness that even a passing listen to the recording revealed. NLOTH succeeds where Pop failed because its exploration reaches the same emotional depth by a route that feels to listeners less dark and devoid of hope. Where Pop‘s glimmer and shine was all in the packaging, NLOTH‘s brilliance is hidden within songs whose weighty messages are delivered amidst lighthearted titles. The anthem-like quality of “Stand Up Comedy” could be passed off simply as drivel if considering its title alone and not its message of “standing up for your love.” Likewise, listeners might think that the most creative expression in the song “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” is its quirky title, but the hidden grain of meaning within the lyrics is that change is slow and difficult, but it’s something every generation has the opportunity to do.

Even a surface listen to NLOTH should peg it as an excellent guitar album, a hard-hitting rock ‘n’ roll record. But a more refined ear might hear in it U2′s most well-rounded sound yet. Exoticism, complexity, ambiance, ethereal qualities and depth are all characteristic of NLOTH to a level they’ve never been present collectively on a U2 album before. By taking the best traits from their recent past and adapting them to today’s purpose, U2 just may have created an evolutionary musical masterpiece of which even Darwin could be proud.