Let me state this loud and clear: I am not a U2 fan. I find Bono’s voice annoying. I find Edge’s guitar sound tacky. What other people seem to find emotional and empowering, I find stale and overblown. Of course, I’ll admit they’ve produced some magnificent work, especially in their late-80s, early-90s heyday, but recently the band have careened between cringe-worthy experimentation (1997’s “Pop”) and lazily bombastic stadium-rock (2004’s “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”).
What’s more, Bono’s alternately sickening and actually-quite-laudable media-whoring has increasingly overshadowed his group’s music. It may be hard to grasp now, but Bono did not make his name prancing about in African villages and kicking back with Nelson Mandela. Once upon a time, people actually thought of him as an Irish post-punk rocker, not as that man with silly sunglasses who follows politicians about. Don’t worry if you didn’t realize that: Even Bono himself recently admitted he sees himself as activist first, musician second.
Of course, U2 are an Important Band – capital i, capital b – but if anything their importance has speeded their demise. They’ve been crowned biggest bloody band in the world so frequently that the title’s lost its currency. In today’s blink-and-they’re-gone world, these four Irishmen have moved beyond mere superstar status into being near-mummified rock gods. They’re one of the few bands in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to be recording new music, let alone breathing, so hearing them on the radio next to people like Rihanna and Britney Spears is an oddly perplexing experience, like seeing JK Rowling on the same shelf as Dostoyevsky. No wonder everyone refers to them as “rock’s elder statesmen” – they’re one rung shy of Led Zeppelin, and half that band is already pushing up the daisies.
In the end, though, the real question is simple: do we even need U2 anymore? Every day it seems like a new group is jumping on the “let’s imitate U2” bandwagon, apparently the easiest road to big bucks and superstardom. First Coldplay did it, repeatedly rewriting “With or Without You” with a few more pianos and a bit more sop. Then the Killers joined in the fun, ditching the dance-rock sounds of their debut for the didactic grandstanding of “Sam’s Town,” which may as well have been called “The Joshua Tree, pt. 2.” Most recently, Kings of Leon decided to follow the crowd, abandoning their homespun garage rock sound for echoing stadium sing-alongs on their 2008 chart-topper “Only By the Night.” I doubt I was the only one who mistook their recent single “Use Somebody” for a U2 cover – with its ringing guitars, whooping vocals and painfully pompous chorus, it’s a dead ringer for U2 circa 1987. So if every rock singer’s got a Bono complex these days, is it time for the real Bono to trade in the mike so he can make saving the world a full-time job?
Well, on the basis of their new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” not quite yet. Where their previous few records sounded like U2 on autopilot, the band appear rejuvenated here, and that’s not because they’re playing louder. In fact, apart from the randy, oversexed first single “Get On Your Boots,” “No Line on the Horizon” is a quiet and contemplative work, a grower of an album that doesn’t reveal many of its gifts upon first listen. You can judge this one by its cover: Producer Brian Eno, who worked with the group during their peak, has helped them craft a record filled with open spaces, sonically as well as emotionally.
For perhaps the first time in their career, U2 sound comfortable with their age, neither lazily exhuming their past work nor fumbling desperately for the contemporary mainstream. It makes for a surprisingly engaging listen, and finally reminds me why every band on the radio is imitating these four old men: No one makes epic, widescreen rock music quite like they do.
Like every other U2 album, “No Line on the Horizon” splits itself fairly evenly between upbeat and downbeat fare, though the sequencing makes sure tempos are spread evenly across the record. Without a doubt, it is the slower songs that constitute the album’s emotional core, and many of them linger in the memory long after they’ve stopped playing.
Certainly this can be said of the cinematic “Moment of Surrender,” in which Eno crafts a ravishingly spacious soundscape for Bono to get lost in. Rarely has Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.’s rhythm section sounded so lush and delicate, and when the Edge’s guitar finally shivers and explodes into the token solo, it doesn’t feel like formula. It’s thrilling and climactic, cutting through the song’s tension like every great guitar solo should.
More desolate though no less compelling is “White as Snow,” a crystalline ballad recounting the last thoughts of a dying soldier in Afghanistan. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, I know, but it works in every way, the hymnal melody building slowly and solemnly against a chilly backdrop of pianos and guitars. It’s an unusually subdued track from this most didactic of bands, and even when Bono does start wailing about halfway through, the cathartic break seems to make sense.
The album’s highlight comes at the end, however, with the meditative, spine-tingling beauty of “Cedars of Lebanon.” In the song, Bono describes the Middle East from the perspective of a photojournalist, reciting snapshot images and experiences in a weathered, lifeless tone. Bono may hardly be the world’s greatest lyricist, but on “Cedars of Lebanon” he redeems many of his past sins, the opening “uno, dos, tres, catorce” of “Vertigo” included.
“Child drinking dirty water from the river bank / soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank / I’m waiting on the waiter, he’s taking a while to come / watching the sun go down on Lebanon,” he intones, asking himself how he can “compress complicated lives into a simple headline.” For four minutes and thirteen seconds, it’s easy to forget who exactly is singing this stuff – and on the biggest band in the world’s twelfth album, that’s remarkable indeed.
Still, there’s more than enough of U2’s standard fist-pumping fare on “No Line on the Horizon” to keep fans happy. The title track is triumphant U2 101, sleekly and compactly produced by Eno; “Breathe” is equally majestic, a mid-tempo rocker surging with sparkling pianos and guitars; and “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” is one of the album’s few moments of humor, a hooky, lightweight pop song in which Bono claims “every generation has a chance to change the world” with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Easily the best of the upbeat bunch is “Magnificent,” an instantly classic U2 anthem that comes off like a sequel to “Pride (In the Name of Love).” The song is every bit as flashy and ostentatious as its name, and all the better for it.
While “No Line on the Horizon” does prove that U2 aren’t over the hill – to crib one of the better puns I’ve seen recently – it is certainly no masterpiece. A fair number of tracks do fall flat, from the monumentally dull “Being Born” to the clumsy “Unknown Caller,” a rather odd song in which Bono chants techno-babble like “force quit / and move to trash” as if covering Daft Punk’s “Technologic.”
The most conspicuous failure is definitely the aforementioned “Get On Your Boots,” an awkwardly “down with the youth” attempt at electro-rock that just makes the band sound twice their age. Not only is it a baffling choice for a single, but it should never have been included on the record in the first place; and certainly not bang in the middle, where it rudely disrupts the album’s flow.
So, do we still need U2 around? On the strengths of “No Line on the Horizon,” the answer is a resounding yes. Less try-hard than Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” and certainly more focused than the Killers’ “Day & Age,” the album proves that U2 are still undisputedly the kings of anthemic rock.
In the end, though, the true strength of “No Line on the Horizon” is how deftly it sidesteps the band’s gargantuan legend. Neither playing up the band’s past nor trying to escape it, there is a settled, confident ease to the record, one in which you can momentarily forget you’re listening to the biggest band in the world. Listening to U2’s last album, all I could picture was the avalanche of iPod commercials the band were involved with at the time. Listening to “No Line on the Horizon,” U2 are once again more band than brand, and it’s a refreshing change of pace.
"No Line on the Horizon" released on 27 February 2009 by Interscope Records.
Images courtesy of Interscope Records and Empire Online.
Published in the Nassau Weekly.
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