Reggie Thee Dog said:
I don't find a lot to dislike on this album. I think if anything the song structure is pretty strong on these songs. Some stuff has the feeling of maybe the had a little "too much time" to work on it. But all-in-all I like the sound and feel of this album.
Exactly, well said. It seems if they had "dirtied" up the songs just a little more they could have fooled a lot of people into thinking it was more about innovation and less about song craft. when it's clear that U2 want to make great songs, not great sounds.
And I would define that by meaning the changes, chord changes and melody lines would flow more seamlessly if they had been less worked on, but perhaps wouldn't have been overall as strong. You can see this in the early versions of Native Son/Vertigo and Xanax/Fast Cars. There are some fantastic moments in the early versions of those songs, but overall they were improved upon. So this is what you have with the current U2, love it or listen to something else.
Ideally a musician might want to do both, but it's easier said than done. Miami has some of the greatest "sounds" U2 have ever made although most people on this forum hate the "song" itself.
Very subjective, of course but we are fans. The more undefined the line between 'songs' and 'sound', the more complete the actual music is, IMO
What I mean, is that as someone that constantly records and plays my own music, I can see the problem. It's cool to come up with a great sound, a guitar lick, a keyboard part, a distorted fucke dup sounding bass line, great drum parts etc. But to tie that into a song and make the song 'stronger' is much harder to do. And on the opposite, it's cool to write a nice little song on the acoustic guitar but tedious to try and paint the song with extra effects, or adjusting for more 'sonic' textures.
It's very fun to do, not all of it is great, but it's my #1 hobby.
So I liken U2 to currently writng the 'sound' around the songs whereas maybe in the 90's they were writing the 'song' around the sounds.
I don't know if that makes sense to anyone, but it's what I see with U2. I appreciate what they are doing now, very much. It's not so easy to do. And if anything I think it takes guts to actually write in the manner they are doing it. It would be much easier to come up with a cool techno sequencer riff and have it play throughout a song and fool a bunch of pretentious eggheads who want U2 to be more "innovative". It's all going in the same direction as it once was, it's just now U2 want the songs to be more solid than just coming up with 'riffs' so to speak.
And yes, I do think something gets lost in doing that, but it strengthens other aspects, take the positives with the negatives.
