Originally posted by QQ Magazine, February 25, 2009
By Paul Rees
No Line on the Horizon
Mercury
Five stars
Brian Eno recently gave Q an insight into the method by which U2 make records. It was, he said, tortuous, since they rebuilt, scrapped and rebuilt every song, over and over again. At any given point during recording, a track was as likely to be a lost case as it was to be in match shape.
The quality of each album, Eno noted, therefore depended entirely upon how many songs there were in the latter of those categories when deadline arrived. And since there was no way of controlling such things, fate played a decisive hand in how good or otherwise a U2 album turned out to be. Fortune had evidently been kind for The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, less so for, say, Pop. With No Line on the Horizon, U2 are holding a winning hand again.
In many respects, it is Pop that has had the most influence on this record. Perhaps their most underrated album, it nevertheless amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Buoyed by the two years they spent touring Achtung Baby, and during which they also made the experimental Zooropa, on it U2 tried to stretch out further still and over-extended. It was, they are still wont to bemoan, never properly finished, the result of ridiculously drawn-out sessions and the never-to-be-repeated folly of booking a tour in advance of leaving the studio.
Upon release Pop was, as history has recorded, poorly received, no one entirely sure as to whether the U2 who were then poncing around the globe inside a giant lemon were playing an elaborate joke on them or not. Since when, the band who'd seemed blessed with an unshakeable self-belief lost the stomach for challenging both themselves and their audience.
All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb recovered any lost commercial ground (and Pop hardly left them on their uppers), but they're meat and potatoes records -- solid, reliable, a couple of rallying tracks apiece, otherwise unremarkable and unloved. No Line on the Horizon is a reaction against them in the same way as they were a reaction against Pop.
Clearly key to pushing U2 out of their comfort zone are Eno and his fellow producer Daniel Lanois. They arrived to steer the band through The Unforgettable Fire, the first great, questing U2 album, and stayed on board for The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. And if they were cowed as the band on All That You Can't Leave Behind, their absence for How to Dismantle… was keenly felt. Following an aborted hook-up with Rick Rubin (so obviously the wrong man at the wrong time for this record), they, and that other enduring U2 cohort Steve Lillywhite, are back here, their mission surely to prod, cajole and tease adventure out of their charges.
The extent to which they have succeeded in doing so is evidenced by the lead-off single, "Get On Your Boots." Here, once again, are Camp U2, missing presumed mothballed since the PopMart lemon went into storage. Here, too, is Edge's monster guitar and a Bono who can poke fun at himself. "I don't want to talk about wars between nations," teases the little fellow, "not right now. Hey, sexy boots...." The better that this all comes within the sort of big playful beast of a song they haven't gone near since the ill-fated, but really rather fabulous "Discothéque."
"Get On Your Boots" is located within the middle of No Line on the Horizon's three distinct sections (something perhaps befitting an album made in such far-flung locations as New York, Dublin and Fez) -- the one that has a mirrorball twirling above its head and a neon-lit dance floor beneath its feet. Here you will also find "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," their most unabashed pop song since "Sweetest Thing," and "Stand Up Comedy," wherein Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. bring forth U2's hitherto unrevealed funky side and Edge comes over all Led Zeppelin.
The first part of No Line on the Horizon contains the U2 of wide-open spaces, of sweeping mountain valleys, and of Edge's signature chiming guitar lines. It is home to the title track (Eno's gloops and loops, a swelling crescendo of a middle eight, "Magnificent" (a re-boot of "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?") and "Unknown Caller" (icy piano lines, a naggingly effective repeating guitar figure). And to "Moment of Surrender," the first of two tracks Eno has stated are the best he's worked on yet. With Bono in blue-eyed soul man guise, a solo from Edge that sails deep into Pink Floyd territory and a seven-plus minute running time, it's this album's "One" or "With or Without You," with added bonus points.
"Breathe" is the other outright window of which Eno speaks –- it's all jungle rumble drums and crashing guitars, Bono negotiating a breathless jumble of verses into the mother of all emotive U2 choruses. "Breathe" arrives during the album's final third, which provides No Line on the Horizon with its twist in the tail as it heads down winding souks in the evening half light, the smells of incense and spices heavy in the air. Alongside it are the slow-burning atmospherics of "Fez – Being Born," and the hushed, gentle shifts of "White As Snow" and the closing "Cedars of Lebanon," songs as spare and still as U2 have written.
What else to tell? Edge, as suggested, is on fine form, Bono better still. Lyrically, he has reined in his tendency to the overblown and/or the wincing, with wit, warmth and some keen observation in their stead ("Cedar of Lebanon"'s story of a career foreign correspondent is especially acutely rendered). And vocally, with age has come greater control and craft; while he still activates that sermon-on-the-mount setting, he does so less frequently and with exponentially more effective results.
Simply, what all of this amounts to is the best U2 album since Achtung Baby. With time, it may prove to be better still
Download: Magnificent//Moment of Surrender//I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight//Get On Your Boots//White As Snow//Breathe
© Q Magazine, 2009.
Originally posted by UncutRock juggernaut's 12th studio album is a grower
Uncut Magazine, February 25, 2009
By Andrew Mueller
Never has any rock 'n' roll band been so polarizing an entity, so adored and abhorred, so blessed/cursed with the ability to inspire and capacity to infuriate, as U2. For every one of the millions who've been roused, thrilled and moved by them, there’s at least one other, whose life's experience of popular culture has been partially defined by how very, very much they hate this group.
Inevitably, both constituencies will find much to fuel their passions and/or goad their furies in this, U2's 12th album, an artefact that has next to no hope of being judged wholly on its own merits. Possibly in recognition of the mixed blessings of becoming a genre unto themselves, parts of No Line on the Horizon duly find U2 -- not for the first time -- essaying some mischievous sabotage of their own reputation.
"Stand up to rock stars,” suggests the funky, Led Zepplin-ish "Stand Up Comedy," before describing such creatures as "Napoleons in high heels...Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas." "The right to appear ridiculous," declares Bono on the cute pop shimmer "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," "is something I hold dear."
In fact, U2 exercise this prerogative only sparingly on No Line on the Horizon. Aside from the quoted zingers and the sprightly single, "Get On Your Boots" -- Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" cutting a rug at U2's own "Discothéque" -- No Line on the Horizon is serious, even solemn, reminiscent of a younger band, circa The Unforgettable Fire, seeking to sublimate their anxiety in piety. Pre-release suggestions that No Line on the Horizon would constitute an audacious sonic leap were somewhat over-stated: the recurring, defining motifs of the album are old-school U2. Several tracks (the title cut, "Magnificent," "Unknown Caller," "Stand Up Comedy," "Fez – Being Born") bear an oh-wo-woah chant along echoing down the ages from "Pride (In the Name of Love)," Edge's guitar, though no less adventurous in places than it has been on every U2 album since Achtung Baby, is still most often driven by a heavy foot on the delay pedal.
A dozen albums in, it's possible to perceive U2's catalogue as four distinct -- if you will -– gospels, each of three chapters: the opening salvo of Boy/War/October, all nerves, good intentions and adolescent bluster; The Unforgettable Fire/The Joshua Tree/Rattle and Hum are from ambition to triumph to hubris; the bleak irony and exuberant experimentation of Achtung Baby/Zooropa/Pop; the reconciliation of what they'd learned with who they always were embodied in 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind and 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
Unprecedented five-year delay not withstanding, No Line on the Horizon feels more than anything a companion piece to this latter pair. While some unusual ideas and influences percolate through the album, they never prevent U2 from sounding like U2. More than half the tracks launch from false starts -- glimmers and wobbles of keyboard and effects briefly announcing themselves before being overwhelmed by the group doing what we've become accustomed to them doing ("Fez – Being Born" starts with what sounds like a radio dial flicking between stations, as if attempting to tune U2 in). It is doubtless no reflection on the way the sessions ran, but it's difficult to shift the image of producers Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite noodling boffinishly at synthesizers and sequencers only to be blasted out of the recording studio by an impatient rock 'n' roll band yelping "1-2-3-4!"
Much of No Line on the Horizon bustles with such urgency. The title track crashes in like a wave over the bows, washes of keyboards retreating to reveal a growling guitar riff retreaded from "The Fly," and one of U2's most memorably anthemic choruses. "Magnificent" is a thrilling rush, an older, wiser, but no less devil-driven update of "I Will Follow," Bono hoarse at the limits of his range. "Unknown Caller" is the most dramatic bait-and-switch on a record riddled with them –- a gentle Edge guitar figure and birdsong an unlikely foundation for the gradual erection of a terrifically unabashed stadium epic. "Moment of Surrender" evokes the gloomier reaches of Achtung Baby, a distinctly Pink Floyd-ish backdrop eventually acknowledged by an unmistakably Gilmour-ish guitar solo.
Lyrically, this is U2's least transparent work for some time. A weariness of being spokesband for every damn thing may be gleaned from "Get On Your Boots," where Bono announces, I don't want to talk about wars between nations/Not right now."
Though the album's retreat/venture (it's never quite clear which) into opacity will come as a relief to many -- U2 themselves likely among them -- it seems a shame in light of two beautifully wrought narratives toward the close of the album. "White As Snow" tries to see Afghanistan from inside the helmet of a foreign soldier (the lines "The road refuses strangers/The land the seed we sow," could have come from an early draft of Kipling's The White Man's Burden). It is both the most modest and most affecting track on the record, and one of the best things Bono has ever sung. The closing cut, "Cedars of Lebanon," is a war correspondent's nightmare that maintains this essentially optimistic group's counter-intuitive tradition of ending their albums with rueful comedowns (think "Mothers of the Disappeared," "Love is Blindness," "Wake Up Dead Man").
It gets more difficult with every release to hear a U2 album as anything but a U2 album -- everyone reading this will have a history with the band, whether they like it or not. More than anything else that U2 have done though, No Line on the Horizon requires and rewards checking in without baggage. It's U2's least immediate album -- but there's something about it that suggests it may be one of their most enduring.
© Uncut, 2009.
Originally posted by MojoBlue Sky Thinking
Mojo Magazine, February 25, 2009
Problem: you're the biggest band in the world but you really want to be the best. Solution: reunite with your old guru and dream it all up again. Has it worked? asks Keith Cameron.
When guitar-slinging ornithologists British Sea Power released 2008's Do You Like Rock Music, a statement on the band's website claimed it exemplified a dichotomy between things which are demonstrably "rock," and those with which are equally clearly not. Heading the "not rock" category, next to "Mussolini" and "tuberculosis," were U2.
Well, we've all done it, most of us not so cleverly. Ian McCulloch called them "spud-peelers." Big bands drive big cars, and if the singer in the band is prone to standing on the roof and yelling at people, that just makes him a more irresistible target. But it's testimony to U2's endurance that groups espousing elite aesthetics still feel obliged to take a pop at them. Of course, the problem is the singer, whose ability to walk while having both feet planted in his mouth has long confounded medical experts. In a series of recent interviews, even Larry Mullen Jr., U2's own drummer, admitted to cringing at Bono's fraternization with scummy world leaders, while Bono himself quipped: "I'm in a band with people who persecute me as a national sport."
Then again, U2 are not normal. Few bands, let alone a band as phenomenally successful, seek to re-evaluate themselves so regularly, while agonizing over the creative process so much. No Line on the Horizon, the band's 12th studio album, has been two years in the making. Both 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind and 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb were modern rock retrofits of the perceived "classic" U2 sound, glossy exercises in retrenchment after the new model '90s U2 hit the rocks with Pop. Ship steadied, the remit here was to seek deeper waters; less instant gratification, more exploration. U2 again hired long-time creative foils Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, and went to Morocco for compositional hothousing, giving the pair songwriting as well as production credits. The result is a collage of several kinds of classis U2 albums, one that has the beauty of their panoramic '80s Eno/Lanois recordings plus the synthetic experimentation and dalliances with pop merriment which revolutionised the band's modus operandi from Achtung Baby onwards.
Assessing the strategy's success depends rather on which U2 you like. If the notion of Bono in supplicating soul-singer mode prompts a gag reflex then "Moment of Surrender"'s gospel smoulder will be anathema. The Queens of the Stone Age-cover-"Pump It Up" hooley of "Get On Your Boots" might be manna to those who prefer U2 when they're not trying to change the world, but it does feature the words "Hey sexy boots" sung by a 48-year-old father of four. Still, both songs are graced by swaggering performances, which sets apart the album from its immediate predecessors where the emphasis was on evoking a collective, even homogenous sonic mood. "Moment of Surrender"'s languid guitar solo by The Edge is more clearly redolent of David Gilmour than his trademark ego-free geometrics, while much of "Boot"'s daffy appeal rests in Bono's bravura vocal sparring.
"Boots" is a keynote song, inasmuch as it's the first single but atypical of the album's overall contemplative tone. Having it appear halfway through -- on the previous three U2 albums the first single was also the first track -- also indicates a tactical shift. On its predecessors, the dialogue between band and listener was exhortative and welcoming, but here the invitation to join far more casual. No Line on the Horizon's opener is the title track, which with queasy drones and Mullen's nervy Krautrock motif summons echoes of "Zoo Station," before Bono, straining for dramatic tension, laspes horribly into Chris Martinese, both in his mannered vocal inflection and screeds of lyrical twaddle ("I know a girl with a hole in her heart/She says infinity's a great place to start."
As often in the past, here the ensemble Sturm und Drang rescues the singer from total calamity. But much of what follows vindicates Mullen's recent assertion that this album features "some of the best music we've ever written." For all the ambient noises-off there's a sense of space; not every corner has been neurotically filled with sound. On "Magnificent" the martial snare drums ratchet The Edge's vertiginous delayed guitar figures across a rock landscape that this band realised to near perfection circa The Unforgettable Fire and which they've now updated with no loss of awe. Bono, too, is at his best, the guileless naif lovestruck by a devotion that feels religious but deals in universal truths. The protagonist of "Unknown Caller" is not unusual in this record in being lost, spiritually broken, "In a place of no consequence or company," until intervention -- divine or otherwise -- from a voice dialling in scrambled self-help commands ("Restart and re-boot yourself"; "Escape yourself, and gravity"; "Shush now"). The refrain's mechanised chants recall Berlin-era Bowie (significally, Eno is credited with lyrics as well as music), as does the whole's evocation of both frigidity and tenderness, thanks hugely to Adam Clayton's remarkable bass perambulations: the final 90 seconds, featuring French horn segueing into a seemingly improvised Edge shred-up, is indeed as exalted as any U2 music gets.
Thematically, we have been here before: lives out of balance seek redemption, or just relief. Bono has talked of this album's lyrical shift towards third-person characterisation, but given that Bono himself an assumed persona, the distinction hardly seems conclusive. Indeed, one of the "fictional" songs, "White As Snow," is the album's nadir, an overwrought folk ballad presumably inspired by a war in the East ("only poppies laugh over the crescent moon"), and the music is as lumpy as the words. Better by far is "Cedars of Lebanon," the album's low-key but tense closer: over acoustic guitar patterns Bono mutters what is obstensibly the narrative of a hard-bitten war correspondent ("I'm here 'cos I don't want to go home"), but could equally be the wee-hours reflection of a peripatetic rock star-celebrity-campaigner: "Choose your enemies carefully, 'cos they will define you."
More efficacious than either, though, is "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," a superficial pop anthem formed around a dainty kernel of pure melodic gold. So cumulatively devastating is the band's delivery that it enobles the succession of cute self-referential Bono homilies ("The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear"). Eno-free, it's produced and arranged by Steve Lillywhite and will.i.am.
That Eno should be absent from one of the album's defining moments is apt, as the notion of him waving his wizard's wand is too glib to explain No Line on the Horizon's overall success. This band apparently feels compelled to atone for whatever forces turned them, and not Echo and the Bunnymen (or Teardrop Explodes, or Magazine), into superstars. And for all its flaws, No Line on the Horizon suggests that if you like rock music, you have to deal with U2.
© MOJO/Bauer, 2009.
Originally posted by GuardianU2: No Line On the Horizon
The Guardian, February 26, 2009
By Alexis Petridis
Rating: Three stars
In the 1996 documentary Tantrums and Tiaras, Elton John is shown detailing his mind-boggling earnings. "What would you do if people stopped buying your albums and coming to your shows?" asks a voice off camera. John looks completely baffled, as if the voice has just asked him if he's planning to grow gills and go and live under the sea. "That's not going to happen," he frowns. "It just isn't."
It's a reminder that there exists a rarefied, clubbable world beyond mere rock stardom. Its membership criteria make the Garrick look like a Pitcher and Piano: so stringent that U2, formed in 1976, are probably the most recent addition to its ranks. And life there brings its own artistic challenges. What do you do when your commercial success has been so consistent for so long that you know for a fact there's no end to it? The obvious answer is whatever you want, but as U2 discovered with the release of Pop, it doesn't work quite like that. Their 1997 album was a well-meaning but clumsy stab at continued contemporaneity: like David Bowie going drum 'n' bass, the co-production credit for minor-league trip-hopper Howie B seems the perfect symbol of a major artist trying a bit too hard in the '90s. Reeling from the shock of an album that was only certified platinum once in America, U2 clearly discovered that the urge not merely to be successful, but to be more successful than everybody else -- the urge that had powered them past infinitely hipper, more acclaimed post-punk contemporaries into the realm of Elton John in the first place -- was still as strong as ever. Cue the manhandling of minor-league trip-hoppers from the producer's chair and the reassuring sound and sales figures of 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind and 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
And yet simply being the biggest clearly isn't enough for U2 either: the saga behind No Line On the Horizon suggests a band keen to push beyond their comfort zone again. Sessions with Rick Rubin were abandoned. Recording took place in Morocco. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois have been elevated from co-producers to co-writers. You can certainly hear the duo's influence in the charming opacity of the album's sound: the drones of feedback and Can-like drum clatter of the opening title track; the lustrous collage of sounds that make up "Fez – Being Born"; the appearance of brass, not in the form of a blaring horn section but a mournful French horn, at the climax of "Unknown Caller."
All are great moments, but the reality is more complicated than a return to the self-assured experimentation of Achtung Baby and Zooropa, as evidenced by single "Get On Your Boots," which sets its cap at "Subterranean Homesick Blues" but winds up duking it out with "We Didn't Start the Fire" for the title of Most Excruciating Rapid Fire List Song Ever Written. Suffice to say that an august U.S. rock mag approvingly used the adjective "zany" to describe it, which pretty much sums up its abject ghastliness. Its presence here isn't the only misjudgment. "Moment of Surrender" doesn't have enough of a tune to support the full seven-minute gospel treatment. "Stand Up Comedy" features self-deprecating verses, the lyrical equivalent of Bono giving you a chummy, "Ooh-aren't-I-awful?" wink: "Stand up to rock stars ... beware of small men with big ideas." You can understand the impulse to pre-empt criticism, but allied to a watery tune, the overall effect is to make U2 sound tentative and unconvinced, two things surely no one wants U2 to be. Far better to embrace the very thing they're most often criticised for, and seem most keen to shy away from -- the unironic, lighters-out, "I was born to sing for you" earnestness this album offers only on "Magnificent." The title of "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," meanwhile, reveals rather more about the song than you suspect is intended, with its self-conscious tone of You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here But It Helps.
A person of a certain disposition might feel the will to live seeping from them at the very thought of a U2 song called "Cedars of Lebanon," but it turns out to be one of the album's biggest successes: a beautiful, downbeat coda to a confused and confusing album, one that can't decide whether it's ironic or sincere, experimental or straight-forward, and instead attempts to be all things to all people, with inevitably mixed results. Listening to it, you get the feeling that U2's belief in themselves as boundary-pushers was shaken, perhaps irrevocably, by Pop's relative failure. Maybe No Line On the Horizon's guaranteed multi-platinum success will give them more confidence next time round. That's one of the privileges of life in the rarefied world beyond rock stardom: you always get another chance.
© Guardian News and Media Limited, 2009.
Originally posted by ChicagoU2's new 'Horizon' a beautiful day for band
Chicago Sun-Times, February 26, 2009
By Jim DeRogatis, Pop Music Critic
In the late '70s, as the punk explosion transformed the British and American rock scenes, some of the biggest groups of the preceding years drew inspiration from the new energy and aesthetic to craft albums which, in many cases, stand as great last gasps before impending dinosaurdom.
The Rolling Stones responded with Some Girls (1978), Led Zeppelin with In Through the Out Door (1979) and Yes with Going for the One (1977), to name a few.
Classic-rock superstars on the same level a generation later, U2 did something similar with Achtung Baby in 1991, at the height of the alternative and Britpop movements. But Bono and his bandmates arguably were even more courageous in abandoning the stadium bombast that had come to characterize their sound in favor of much edgier art-rock experimentation and a new ironic attitude that seemed to scoff at their earlier, often pompous and heavy-handed rattle and hum.
It was a good trick, but the Irish rockers could only really do it once, and after Zooropa (1993) and Pop (1997) continued trying to push the envelope with ever-diminishing results, the musicians retreated to bland, retro-minded U2-by-numbers conservatism in the new millennium with All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000) and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004), in between Bono's decidedly non-ironic attempts to end world hunger, cure AIDS and stop global conflict.
These good acts stand in sharp contrast to blatant money-grabs such as the band's mega-merchandising deal with Live Nation or its high-priced stadium tours, and as the musicians edged closer to age 50, it seemed as if their own status as musical dinosaurs was a sad inevitability. Or was it?
That question looms large over No Line on the Horizon, the band's 12th studio album, arriving in stores on Tuesday but already streaming online. It was voiced most eloquently by Bono himself: "If this isn't our best album, we're irrelevant," he told the Times of London (though during the obnoxious hype campaign, I've heard him say something similar to many a great sage, including Billy Bush of Access Hollywood).
To cut to the chase: No, No Line on the Horizon is not U2's best album; that honor still belongs to Achtung Baby. But it is a much stronger effort than any since, or than I'd have expected the band to still be capable of producing. And if the group doesn't quite seem as brave, original or freshly inspired as it did 18 years back -- much less than at the start of its career three decades ago -- well, the new disc at least proves that the quartet is not yet totally irrelevant.
Mind you, this is not the same as saying U2 is as important and creative a band as U2 thinks it is, and to an even greater degree than on The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987) or Achtung Baby, a big portion of the credit for the new album's success is due to the familiar production team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, as the musicians themselves acknowledge: Despite their long association, this is the first time Eno and Lanois have received co-songwriting credit with U2 -- their names appear on seven of 11 tracks -- and they also performed with the band in the studio, Lanois on pedal steel guitar and Eno on his famous electronic manipulation/"Enossification."
Having abandoned initial sessions with Rick Rubin, a producer who'd have been much more likely to deliver yet another retread U2 rock album, the musicians invited Eno and Lanois to once again challenge U2 about what U2 "should" sound like. Addressing their relationship in 1992, Eno told me: "They have a lot of people obviously who will encourage them to do more of what they've already done...I'm part of the small contingent that redress that by coming along and hearing things that I don't recognize and saying, 'Wow, now that sounds really exciting. Let's follow that for awhile.'"
Here, the best results come from the roiling grooves and otherworldly melodies of the title track and "Unknown Caller"; the gospel transcendence of "Moment of Surrender" (which brings to mind Eno's recent collaboration with David Byrne on "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today"); the Middle Eastern drone of "Fez — Being Born"; the inspired rewrite of the 12th Century hymn "Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel" as "White as Snow," a song about a soldier dying in Afghanistan, and "Cedars of Lebanon," which finds Bono channeling Frank Sinatra during a barroom chat set against trademark Eno ambience.
Through it all, the musicians are at the top of their games, with drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton sounding more fluid but propulsive than ever, and the Edge once more proving himself a master of minimalism while adding half a dozen simple but striking new sounds to his bag of sonic tricks. As for soon-to-be-49-year-old Nobel Peace Prize contender Paul David Hewson, his instrument remains a strong one, though he's increasingly confused about whether he wants to say Great and Important Things ("I was born/I was born to sing for you/I didn't have a choice but to lift you up," he croons in the soggy and ponderous "Magnificent") or scoff Fly-like at that very notion while laughing at his own ubiquitous image ("Stand up to rock stars/Napoleon is in high heels/Josephine, be careful/Of small men with big ideas," he advises in the equally annoying "Stand Up Comedy").
Even worse are U2's collaboration with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas on "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," an ill-advised attempt to get funky, and the first singe "Get On Your Boots," a space-age take rewrite of a vintage Nancy Sinatra psychedelic go-go ditty. Both tracks find the musicians protesting their youthful vitality to such a degree that they wind up sounding like dirty old men too repulsive and embarrassing to be cast in a Viagra commercial.
Given the cringe-worthy lousiness of those four significant missteps, it's even more of a testament to how the lush melodies and swirling sonic inventions of the rest of the disc keep you wanting to come back again and again (albeit with judicious use of the skip/fast-forward function of your CD player or iPod). "Let me in the sound! Meet me in the sound!" Bono chants at different points in no fewer than three of these new songs, and it turns out to be an invitation that's still well worth accepting.
© Chicago Sun-Times, 2009
Originally posted by RollingU2
No Line On The Horizon
RS:5OF 5 STARS
AVERAGE USER RATING:4OF 5 STARS
2009
"I was born to sing for you/I didn't have a choice but to lift you up," Bono declares early on this album, in a song called "Magnificent." He does it in an oddly low register, a heated hush just above the shimmer of the Edge's guitar and the iron-horse roll of bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. Bono is soon up in thin air with those familiar rodeo yells, on his way to the chorus, which ends with him just singing the word "magnificent," repeating it with relish, stretching the syllables.
But he does it not in self-congratulation, more like wonder and respect, as if in middle age, on his band's 11th studio album, he still can't believe his gift — and luck. Bono knows he was born with a good weapon for making the right kind of trouble: the clean gleam and rocket's arc of that voice. "It was one dull morning/I woke the world with bawling," he boasted in "Out of Control," written by Bono on his 18th birthday and issued on U2's Irish debut EP.
He is still singing about singing, all over No Line on the Horizon, U2's first album in nearly five years and their best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's Achtung Baby. "Shout for joy if you get the chance," Bono commands, in a text-message cadence and drill sergeant's bark, in "Unknown Caller." He leads by example in the ham-with-wry pop of "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" — "Listen for me/I'll be shouting/Shouting to the darkness" — then demands his piece of the din in the glam-fuzz shindig "Get on Your Boots": "Let me in the sound!...Meet me in the sound!" God, guilt, love, sin, terrorism and transcendence — Bono juggles them all here, with the usual cracks at his own hubris. ("Stand up to rock stars," he warns in "Stand Up Comedy." "Be careful of small men with big ideas.")
Bono also keeps coming back to the sheer power and pleasure of a long high note and the salvation you can feel in being heard. "I'm running down the road like loose electricity," he jabbers, with some of that nasal acid of the '66 Bob Dylan, through the hard-rock clatter of "Breathe," "while the band in my head plays a striptease."
It is a strange thing to sing on a record that more often reveals itself in tempered gestures, at a measured pace. (The main exception, the outright frivolity of "Get on Your Boots," comes right in the middle, as if the band thought it needed some kind of zany halftime.) Most of the great — and biggest-selling — U2 albums have been confrontational successes: the dramatic entrance on 1980's Boy; the spiritual-pilgrim reach of 1987's The Joshua Tree; the electro-Weimar whirl of Achtung Baby; the return to basics on 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Produced by the now-standard trio of Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite, No Line on the Horizon is closer to the transitional risks — the Irish-gothic spell of 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, the techno-rock jet lag of 1993's Zooropa — but with a consistent persuasion in the guitar hooks, rhythms and vocal lines.
In "No Line on the Horizon," it is the combination of garage-organ drone, fat guitar distortion and Mullen's parade-ground drumming, the last so sharp and hard all the way through that it's difficult to tell how much is him and how much is looping (that is a compliment). The Edge takes one of his few extended guitar solos at the end of "Unknown Caller," a straightforward, elegiac break with a worn, notched edge to his treble tone. "White as Snow" is mostly alpine quiet — guitar, keyboard, Bono and harmonies, like the Doors' "The Crystal Ship" crossed with an Appalachian ballad. "Cedars of Lebanon" ends the album much as "The Wanderer" did on Zooropa, a triumph of bare minimums (this time it's Bono going in circles, through wreckage, instead of Johnny Cash, who sang "The Wanderer") with limpid guitar and electronics suggesting a Jimi Hendrix love song, had he lived into the digital age.
"Fez — Being Born" is the least linear song on this album (no small achievement), a highway ride in flashback images dotted with Bono's wordless yelps and the descending ring of the Edge's guitar. The last lines actually tell you plenty about U2's songwriting priorities: "Head first, then foot/Then heart sets sail." The big irony: Their singer is one of the most insecure frontmen in the business. Bono knows exactly what a lot of you think of his social activism and flamboyant freelance diplomacy. But the flip side of that bravado, in "I'll Go Crazy..." — "The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear" — is a running doubt in Bono's lyrics, that he always goes too far ("Stand Up Comedy") and will never be as good as his ideals. The rising-falling effect of the harmony voices around Bono in the long space-walk "Moment of Surrender" is a perfect picture of where he really wants to be, when he gets to the line about "vision over visibility."
And he's sure he'll never get there on his own. "We are people borne of sound/The songs are in our eyes/Gonna wear them like a crown," Bono crows, next to the Edge's fevered-staccato guitar, near the end of "Breathe" — a grateful description of what it's like to be in a great rock & roll band, specifically this one. Bono knows he was born with a voice. He also knows that without Mullen, Clayton and the Edge, he'd be just another big mouth.
DAVID FRICKE
(Posted: Feb 20, 2009)
Originally posted by USATodayHorizon' evolves with U2's audacity, creativity, innovation
USA Today, February 27, 2009
Edna Gundersen
HOLLYWOOD — Trading a woozy tingle for a restorative jolt, Bono and Edge abruptly switch from margaritas to coffee as they prepare to leave their hotel for a rehearsal stage in downtown Los Angeles. They grew accustomed to such giddy and pronounced mood swings while recording U2's 12th album, No Line on the Horizon, a kaleidoscopic quest that rivals 1991's Achtung Baby for audacity and innovation.
"We had to learn a lot before we could do this," Bono, 48, says. "Normally, you zone in on a particular area and make it your own. On this, we seemed to be able to meander from joy to despair, from introspection to exhibitionism. And there's a lot of humor. I'm surprised, because people don't generally buy a U2 album for the laughs.
"There's fun and frolics here. Real joy, and that's the essence, the life force, of rock 'n' roll."
One of the year's most eagerly anticipated albums, Horizon is garnering raves for brazen and byzantine sonic architecture that rises from U2's familiar foundation of heartfelt rock. The 11-track disc, out Tuesday, found the Irish foursome recording in Morocco, then in Dublin and later in New York and London. The album closes the band's longest gap between studio albums, following 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, which sold 9 million copies worldwide and generated eight Grammys.
Edge, 47, is relieved to emerge from what he calls the "oil rig" after a long spell of concentrated but isolating creativity with Bono, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton. Horizon's lengthy gestation wasn't the result of setbacks or writer's block, but rather a geyser of impulses and detours.
"We would have loved to finish the album last summer, but the songs weren't finished with us," says Edge, sharing a couch with Bono in a Chateau Marmont bungalow cluttered with video gear. "Realizing there was more to this album than what we had, we kept going. We dropped two or three songs, finished up others. It would have been a darker record before."
At Mullen's urging, the band had no timetable and missed the lucrative fall release schedule.
By briefly considering a late 2008 release date, "we lost our way a bit, but when we blew out the deadline, we came back," Bono says. "When anyone said, 'Look, we have to put this out,' Larry said, 'Oh, it's going to ruin everything.' We were making music for its own sake and for each other, and Larry wanted to keep that as long as we could. It was a lovely thing to be lost in."
More cloistered than on past efforts, the band "wasn't thinking about who would be listening to the music in the future or how it would go over live," Edge says.
Second disc on the horizon
After a leisurely recording pace, the band spent a frenzied 48 hours in London rotating seven final mixes, eight vocal versions and lyric rewrites.
Tunes left behind, including the soulful "Every Breaking Wave," are slated for a more meditative album due possibly by year's end. U2 also is sitting on material from early sessions with Rick Rubin, benched after the band reconnected with longtime collaborators Brian Eno and Danny Lanois, who produced Horizon with Steve Lillywhite.
"Rick is a minimalist, which is about getting back to pure essence," Bono says. "That's the theme of this album lyrically, but musically, this is maximalist. He wants to make a U2 album that is hard as nails and tender as can be but musically bare-boned. There is a place for that. This was the time for experimentation, wanderlust and finding other colors."
Edge says they aren't wed to any single formula.
"Rick is methodical, and I'm excited about working in that style as well," he says, noting that the songs he and Bono have been writing for next year's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark Broadway musical require a more disciplined approach.
"There's no strict route to a U2 song," Edge says. "The only thing that's consistent is the search for inspiration. It can start from a drumbeat, a guitar part, a title, a lyric. An entire piece of music can suddenly arrive. We subscribe to the idea that there's no such thing as failure. There's just giving up. We do not give up. We are relentless."
U2's tenacity and artistic daring pay off in Horizon's towering splendor, says Blender editor Joe Levy.
"It combines two moments: the epic grandeur of The Joshua Tree and the experimental audio research of Achtung Baby and Zooropa," he says. "They're at a point where they can be the biggest band in the world and still be edgy, with a capital 'E' in this case. They haven't come out swinging this hard and reaching this high since Joshua. On the surface, it's classic U2. Put on the headphones, and you hear an album every bit as sonically ambitious as Achtung Baby."
Horizon's immediacy, nimble complexities and clear messages cement U2's standing as the only veteran rock band with consistent artistic relevance and commercial clout, he says.
"They don't do it by utilizing the same set of tricks or by having Justin Timberlake and Timbaland on speed-dial," Levy says. "None of their '80s contemporaries -- Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince or Michael Jackson -- managed to continuously keep the focus on new music."
On the road, the band is eclipsed only by the Rolling Stones, whose Bigger Bang is history's top-grossing tour with $558 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. U2's Vertigo tour ranks second with $389 million, and the band will get another shot at the record book when it hits stadiums this summer, its first outdoor U.S. trek in 12 years.
"When U2 tours, it's a major global live entertainment event," says Ray Waddell, Billboard's touring editor. "Only a handful of bands have achieved that sort of international touring superstar status. Though you hate to say anyone is recession-proof, U2 is about as close to that as you can get. It's can't-miss entertainment.
"That said, any band would be foolish not to take into account economic conditions when mounting a major tour, and the U2 team is anything but foolish."
Mediocrity 'would kill us'
Sinking CD sales and the crumbling economy didn't dissuade U2 from gambling on stadiums (the band nearly went broke staging the extravagant 1997-98 PopMart tour) and plowing fresh turf on Horizon.
"The point was to get out of the comfort zone into uncharted territory," Edge says. "We love it when we don't know what we're doing. We're more alive. It has to be about discovery or we lose interest.
"Even so, no matter how far out we go, it always ends up sounding like U2."
Fan loyalty, critical acceptance and the industry's abiding support should fuel U2's nerve, but the band says its self-confidence is the first casualty during months of studio skydiving and spelunking.
"You don't get this much attitude if you're not insecure," Bono says with a laugh. "Insecurity is our best security, and the moment we lose that insecurity, we're in deep trouble. It's important to be out of our depth."
He recites a line from "Cedars of Lebanon," a somber tune from the view of a war correspondent: "Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you."
It's a sly cautionary tag on a character study that reflects a collective regret and despair in today's uneasy world. And it's a U2 mantra.
"U2 never took on obvious enemies -- pretending to sneer at fashion or the establishment," Bono says. "They're useless enemies. The more interesting enemies are your own hypocrisy, the obstacles to realizing your own potential."
More than 30 years after forming in Dublin, "U2 only survives as long as everyone is willing to totally commit," Edge says. "As long as our agendas are aligned and the singular band ego is bigger than our individual egos, we can go on. If that ever is no longer possible, we'd pack it in. None of us could hack turning out mediocre records. It would kill us."
Bono, the globe-trotting activist with demanding commitments worldwide, rediscovered U2's value during a spate of separation anxiety.
"Because I'm on my own in my other lives, I had an epiphany about how much I need to be in this band," he says. "Over the years, you perhaps take for granted the opportunity to make music. I'm very happy as an activist, but it's a very demanding life, a slog, and it can be dirty work. This record put me back in the place I was as a teenager, working in a gas station, dreaming of getting to rehearsal with the band.
"It was so intoxicating to hear an electric guitar or the silver sound of a cymbal. Maybe I needed to be reminded of that."
© USA Today, 2009.
Originally posted by BBCby Chris Jones
16 February 2009
Like all of U2's best work there's a schism at the heart of their 12th studio album. It's the polarity between the hedonistic and the profound; the thin line between the general and the particular: rock and a very hard place. Their very lucrative humanitarianism may stick in the craw of many, but this skill allows them to make important points about all our lives while never forgetting to move our collective booties.
Much of No Line On the Horizon examines the state of the planet from the viewpoint of victims and witnesses. White As Snow sets a traditional air beneath a tale of an Afghanistan where, ''only poppies laugh under a crescent moon''. World citizenry is reflected in uber-cool, William Gibson-style lyrics on Breathe (''16th of June, Chinese Stocks are going up, And I'm coming down with some new Asian virus''). Only in Unknown Caller's dreadful ''Force quit and move to trash'' lines does the hi-tech metaphor card get overplayed.
There's plenty to rejoice about here. Not only is old mucker Steve Lillywhite back at the desk on several tracks, resurrecting the days of War, but the Edge's guitar also returns to the glory days on the title track as well as the hilariously titled I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight; with the echo pedal set to 11. Add to these the massed ''oh, ohs'', and this at least feels like a classic; even if a lack of obviously hummable tunes makes it more of a grower than an instant hit.
The symbiotic relationship with Brian Eno (and Daniel Lanois) seems to have reached the point of imperceptibility. From the musical box sprinkles on the chugging title track to the midway palate cleanser FEZ-Being Born's cut-up first half, the touch may be light but it's now as much a part of their sound as Larry's rattling toms or Adam's one-note runs.
Get On Your Boots sounds unnervingly like U2 doing a Muse impersonation. Not necessarily a bad thing but, as on Pop, it sounds odd when U2 sound like followers rather than leaders. But it would be unrealistic to expect a band at the wrong end of a 35-year career to be as lithe as they once were.
There are at least two classics here. The closing Cedars Of Lebanon is a beautifully weary tale told by a journalist in the Middle East; while conversely Stand Up Comedy is a rowdy, grand gesture urging you to ''stand up for love'' as only U2 can. It also contains one of Bono's greatest lines in "stop helping God across the road like an little old lady''.
It seems that faith is what still drives these men: the faith in music to convey an important message and faith in the power of faith itself. But overall No Line On The Horizon proves that U2 really still have faith in themselves.
Originally posted by Blender'Horizon' Arrives
27 February 2009
BLENDER
They were queuing up in Dublin last night to be first to get hold of the new record - scenes set to be repeated in other countries over the next few days.
And the early reviews suggest the five year wait since 'Bomb' in 2004, will have been worth it.
'It combines two moments,' says Blender editor Joe Levy, 'the epic grandeur of The Joshua Tree and the experimental audio research of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. They're at a point where they can be the biggest band in the world and still be edgy, with a capital 'E' in this case. They haven't come out swinging this hard and reaching this high since Joshua. On the surface, it's classic U2. Put on the headphones, and you hear an album every bit as sonically ambitious as Achtung Baby."
Originally posted by NMEReview: 'No Line on the Horizon'
NME, February 27, 2009
By Ben Patashnik
Rating: 7 out of 10
There's a song on the new U2 album that has quite possibly the worst title since Neanderthal man first bashed one rock with another rock and said, "This one's called 'Same Jeans.'" On -- oh yes -- "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" a small Dubliner called Paul stands on a mountainous melody and proclaims "The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear." In other breaking news, the world isn't flat.
While it may be over four years since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, it's over a decade since the world's biggest band last released an album that could realistically be tagged "brave": the noble failure, Pop. Since then they've become the U2 everyone writes off as dinosaurs -- "Beautiful Day" soundtracking sports highlights, "Uno, dos, tres, catorce!" and "Vertigo" flogging iPods -- the past triumphs of Achtung Baby and The Unforgettable Fire fading further. But where U2's lovable ridiculousness used to stem from their affinity for grandiose musical statements -- the grandstanding sloganeering of "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the "let's save the human race" emoting of "One" -- now it's considered a symptom of their desire to simply continue Being U2 In Public, of Bono thinking he's more than just a singer in a band.
Pleasingly, No Line on the Horizon proves that, rather than just trying to be an out-and-out rock band, had they spent the last decade reining in their experimental leanings but still writing the same ocean-sized pop songs, they'd probably be just as huge as they are now. It's a grand, sweeping, brave record that, while not quite the reinvention they pegged it as, suggests they've got the chops to retain their relevance well into their fourth decade as a band.
Most impressive of all is the seven-minute-plus "Moment of Surrender," a gorgeously sparse prayer built around Adam Clayton's heartbeat bassline and Bono's rough growl. It crawls and creeps and seeps into being, with each separate part knowing exactly when to melt away -- a sweetly melodic Edge solo, a sudden choir of backing vocals for the climactic chorus, a lick of organ behind the verse -- and doesn't feel overlong. Along with the similarly downbeat but no-less-enthralling "Cedars of Lebanon," which is buoyed by Larry Mullen Jr.'s martial drumming and a twinkling guitar, it will never be used on adverts or performed during a Super Bowl halftime show.
"No Line on the Horizon" and "Breathe" have flashes of familiarity, but also the heft and punch of a band half their age; the title track in particular recalls the metallic groove of "Vertigo" but, thanks to The Edge pressing the button marked "freight train" rather than "annoying echo" on his guitar, throbs with a refound passion and remains peppered with new sounds and textures.
And "Breathe," unspectacular on first listen but later proving itself perhaps the best song they've written since "Stuck In a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," is a pummelling foray into blues-rock territory, all crashing chords and a soaring chorus with the simple call to "Walk out into the street/Sing your heart out." The verse is twaddle (kudos, though, for the line "Coming from a long line of travelling salespeople on my mother's side/I wasn't gonna buy just anyone's cockatoo") and patently old-school U2 ridiculous, as is The Edge's nuclear guitar solo, which is perhaps why it sounds so heart-stirringly brilliant.
Unfortunately, the clumsiness of some of the lyrics let No Line down significantly. Much has been made of Bono writing from other points of view, but considering the title track is supposed to be in the words of a traffic cop and yet states "I'm a traffic cop," and the war correspondent narrator of "Cedars..." talks of headlines, deadlines and a "Child drinking dirty water from the river bank/Soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank," you wonder if his boundless imagination couldn't have been employed more subtly. And a close-to-50-year-old using his Apple Mac as inspiration for parts of "Unknown Caller" ("Force quit and move to trash...Restart and reboot yourself") and slithering "sexy boots" on single "Get On Your Boots"? Too far, dad. Only "White As Snow," with its crescendo of "And the water, it was icy/As it washed all over me" is remotely as affecting as the rest of the album seeks to be.
"Magnificent" and "Stand Up Comedy" are astonishingly uninteresting, two bog-standard rock songs that sound like they were reconstituted from the "Atomic Bomb sessions. Bono's falsetto, The Edge's chiming guitar, solid rhythm work from The Other Two (see, they've gone back to anonymity): all too obvious and almost entirely bereft of spark. And "Fez – Being Born" isn't nearly as daring as it thinks it is, merely a meandering slice of ambient doodling before kicking into gear as yet another mid-paced rocker.
No Line is unmistakably U2 (who else would write sleevenotes thanking The Mighty Boosh, Green Day, "Jay-Z and the Queen B" alongside Desmond Tutu, credited -- we s**t you not -- as "The Arch") but in a thoroughly good way. It has the pomp and arrogance of their best work, enough new sounds and interesting new avenues to satisfy the musos and, at its core, is a very good collection of very good songs played very well. A little more silliness would go a long way, though.
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