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U2 still at the top of the rock game
By McGreevy
It is a testimony, not only to the brilliance of U2, but also to their longevity that the release of their new album should continue to generate worldwide excitement.
25 years ago, U2 started out in the world of punk. Musical fashions have come full circle, but they are still there, still relevant.
In that time too, they’ve seen off many pretenders to their title as the biggest band in the world.
Simple Minds, for instance, were equal connoisseurs of earnest stadium rock, but they didn’t survive the 1980s.
For a time, REM were the biggest band in the world with their magnificent back-to-back albums, Green and Automatic For The People, but their latest album, Around The Sun, has underwhelmed the public, as have several others in recent years.
Others like Guns n’ Roses, Nirvana and Oasis never had the longevity to stay at the top for any sustained length of time.
U2 have never compromised on their standards. They have nothing left to prove, but they still have something to say.
At critical times when they could have strayed into irrelevance they reinvented themselves, particularly after the pompous Rattle and Hum which was followed by the brilliant Achtung Baby and most recently when their 1990s albums, Zooropa and Pop, were poorly received.
Even Pop, their relative failure from 1997, was a good album by most standards. Their last album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, was a return to form, full of big songs and ambition.
Fans who have waited four years since then will not be disappointed by the new album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. It is in a similar milieu to its predecessor.
Most will have heard the opening track, Vertigo, a slab of sonic intensity that will surely be their opener for the forthcoming world tour.
It’s the standout track on the new album, U2 at their most energetic and passionate and harking all the way back to Out of Control on their first album Boy, but it is not the best song they ever recorded. It sounds a little like that Kim Wilde’s version of The Supremes song, You Keep Me Hanging On.
The album is dedicated to Bono’s father Bob, who died three years ago, and the best tracks are meditations on grief and identity. Bono had a difficult relationship with his father and there is so much left unresolved.
Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own is another in the great lighter-holding tradition of U2 balladry. It shows how far U2 have come since the absurdly bombastic Bad that they can still pull off these songs without sounding like Michael Bolton.
It’s a song about the helplessness of grief, of so many things left unsaid and unfinished when somebody dies and there is nothing can be done about it.
“We fight all the time/You and I...that’s alright/We’re the same soul/I don’t need/I don’t want to hear you say/That if we weren’t so alike/You’d like me a whole lot more.”
On One Step Closer To Knowing, a song inspired by Noel Gallagher, he sings about being cast drift without a mother or a father. “I’m around the corner from anything that’s real/I’m across the road from hope/I’m under a bridge in a rip tide/That’s taken everything I call my own.”
The album wisely eschews referring to Bono’s campaign to save the planet from itself. He has enough self-awareness to realise that the last thing U2 fans want is to be harangued about all the iniquities in the planet.
There are the obligatory references on the album sleeve to Greenpeace, Amnesty International and debt relief, but conscience salving does not make for good art.
The only oblique reference is on the song Crumbs From Your Table and the lyrics are obscure enough to be about anything.
Ultimately though, the album will stand or fall by the quality of the songs. It is pleasing to report that there isn’t a duff song on How To Dismantle.
The City of Blinding Light and the blues inspired Love and Peace or Else showcase the band’s strengths, the uplifting, sonorous music that has always been the hallmark of U2’s best music.
The album isn’t quite up there with the masterpieces that were The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. It merits in the second rank along with its predecessor, but second rank doesn’t mean second rate, not when U2 have consistently been the biggest band in the world for as long as most of us can remember.
Writing about music, as Elvis Costello once said, is like dancing about architecture. Buy the album and make up your own mind.
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