ruby_tuesday
Babyface
Fairly small review from this weeks observer...
The most effective political rockers still beat their chests, but don't force you to furrow your brow, says a relieved Tom Cox
As someone who generally finds political rock about as appetising as eating his old BTEC sociology essays, I'm never particularly sure I should like U2. In one sense, they're a big, blustery cloud of hot air, a throwback to Eighties worthiness, the last of the believers in the power of rock music to change the way people think. In another, they're a bit of a joke, the band you liked before you got into (what you believed at the time) was properly dangerous, 'alternative' music, then emphatically abandoned when they started getting all pompous and phoning Salman Rushdie in the middle of their gigs.
They've made their mistakes, lived their preposterous conceptual rock fantasies, got wiser, but still their music shows little of the sense of humour that has helped other stadium veterans become good-time survivors.
There will for ever be an aura of Eighties earnestness about their sound - that mix of epic Edge guitar FX (hilariously reduced to its none-too-complex components by comedian Bill Bailey in his recent live shows) and watch-me-while-I-lead-you-into-battle Bono vocals, giving the impression of a band who feel that they're being listened to not just as rock stars but as spokespeople for a generation.
Still, one of the gratifying by-products of the ever-changing moods of pop culture is that traits in a band that once might have sounded dated or self-aggrandising can suddenly start sounding vital again while our backs are turned. Hence these days U2 sound more like trusty elder statesmen of conscientious rock than bloated Live Aid generation casualties.
Like All That you Can't Leave Behind, its critically redeeming predecessor, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb has more in common with the U2 of 1980's Boy (albeit a more slickly produced version) than with 1993's Zooropa, full as it is of soaring and tender anthems which sound big but not overblown, chest-beating but not brow-beating. Its virtue is not so much that its songs make you think about the state of the world, but that they give you the choice whether or not to do so.
Unlike, say, something by Radiohead - who to me always just sound like a more surly, underachieving U2 - it doesn't strive to make its listeners feel clever for absorbing it. Like Alan Partridge mistakenly thinking 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' was penned in an attempt to sum up the dreariness of our weekly day of rest, I can quite happily enjoy songs such as 'Fast Cars' without thinking about their deeper references to the malaise of modern America. On the other hand, I can, if I want, take them and use them to fuel my hatred of the Bush regime. These songs could be political or personal: nothing is ever too explicit.
That might not make U2 the crusaders that you sometimes sense they want to be, but it does make them the most modern, durable kind of political rock animal: one that you can ignore at will, but one that might be more effective in reaching its target than some of their angrier, more right-on contemporaries. Not only that, you just know these songs will sound bloomin' awesome live.
Burn it: 'All Because Of You'; 'Fast Cars'; 'Vertigo'
Overall 4/5
apologies if this has been posted before
The most effective political rockers still beat their chests, but don't force you to furrow your brow, says a relieved Tom Cox
As someone who generally finds political rock about as appetising as eating his old BTEC sociology essays, I'm never particularly sure I should like U2. In one sense, they're a big, blustery cloud of hot air, a throwback to Eighties worthiness, the last of the believers in the power of rock music to change the way people think. In another, they're a bit of a joke, the band you liked before you got into (what you believed at the time) was properly dangerous, 'alternative' music, then emphatically abandoned when they started getting all pompous and phoning Salman Rushdie in the middle of their gigs.
They've made their mistakes, lived their preposterous conceptual rock fantasies, got wiser, but still their music shows little of the sense of humour that has helped other stadium veterans become good-time survivors.
There will for ever be an aura of Eighties earnestness about their sound - that mix of epic Edge guitar FX (hilariously reduced to its none-too-complex components by comedian Bill Bailey in his recent live shows) and watch-me-while-I-lead-you-into-battle Bono vocals, giving the impression of a band who feel that they're being listened to not just as rock stars but as spokespeople for a generation.
Still, one of the gratifying by-products of the ever-changing moods of pop culture is that traits in a band that once might have sounded dated or self-aggrandising can suddenly start sounding vital again while our backs are turned. Hence these days U2 sound more like trusty elder statesmen of conscientious rock than bloated Live Aid generation casualties.
Like All That you Can't Leave Behind, its critically redeeming predecessor, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb has more in common with the U2 of 1980's Boy (albeit a more slickly produced version) than with 1993's Zooropa, full as it is of soaring and tender anthems which sound big but not overblown, chest-beating but not brow-beating. Its virtue is not so much that its songs make you think about the state of the world, but that they give you the choice whether or not to do so.
Unlike, say, something by Radiohead - who to me always just sound like a more surly, underachieving U2 - it doesn't strive to make its listeners feel clever for absorbing it. Like Alan Partridge mistakenly thinking 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' was penned in an attempt to sum up the dreariness of our weekly day of rest, I can quite happily enjoy songs such as 'Fast Cars' without thinking about their deeper references to the malaise of modern America. On the other hand, I can, if I want, take them and use them to fuel my hatred of the Bush regime. These songs could be political or personal: nothing is ever too explicit.
That might not make U2 the crusaders that you sometimes sense they want to be, but it does make them the most modern, durable kind of political rock animal: one that you can ignore at will, but one that might be more effective in reaching its target than some of their angrier, more right-on contemporaries. Not only that, you just know these songs will sound bloomin' awesome live.
Burn it: 'All Because Of You'; 'Fast Cars'; 'Vertigo'
Overall 4/5
apologies if this has been posted before
And welcome ruby_tuesday! 
