NLOTH: General discussion thread

Originally posted by BonoIsTheMessiah:I'm downloading a torrent of something called "U2 No Line On The Horizon Advanced Album 2008." I doubt it's legit, but thought I'd see what it is. Anybody know?

Originally posted by BonoIsTheMessiah:I'm downloading a torrent of something called "U2 No Line On The Horizon Advanced Album 2008." I doubt it's legit, but thought I'd see what it is. Anybody know?

Originally posted by Herald
Review of 'No Line'

By Eamon Carr

Bono will be 49 soon. For the last 33 years he's been punching the air and casting out demons as frontman with U2. Thirty-three years! As glam rockers Mott the Hoople would have it, that's "a mighty long way down rock 'n' roll."

Many of U2's musical contemporaries have either retired or disintegrated. Some have reformed and returned to play the seniors' nostalgia circuit.

But the Dublin quartet are still kicking against the pricks. Still putting themselves through collaborative purgatory to reach a creative heaven. This is to their credit.

Work is what defines an artist. U2 take their gig seriously. Theirs is a vocation. But that's no guarantee of excellence.

Rock stars tend to get flabby. They can afford the many attractive distractions that come their way. As a result, the music suffers. This has been the pattern since before Gladys Presley discovered she was pregnant.

That U2 have delivered a 12th studio album of such elegance and abandon at this stage in their career is quite remarkable.

I'm not bigging up my buddies here. Nodding terms suits both parties. But I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight what I consider to be an artistic heart at the core of this new work that's unerring, fragile and true.

Taken collectively, these songs are a serious piece of work.

There's a line tucked away in the sleeve notes that thanks record company executive Jimmy Iovine "for believing that U2 are a brand new band." Huh! We've heard this before. Yet, once again, the band have managed a unique reinvention.

Not that they're going to emerge as crossdressers or Moonies. But, over the past decade the band appear to have undergone a profound metamorphosis. There's a depth to this album that is subtle, not strident. We've been catching glimpses of it over the years.

Today, there's a scuffed maturity in evidence here that can only come from life experience. It serves U2 well.

In the natural order of things, the ageing U2 should by now be trailing in the wake of younger, more dynamic bands. This is not the case. No Line on the Horizon raises the bar for Coldplay, The Killers and Kings of Leon.

It's an expansive record. Ranging from the seductive ambience of "Moment of Surrender," through the sonic maelstrom of "Stand Up Comedy" to the rural hymnal purity of "White As Snow," this is an 11-track collection that reveals itself gradually. While labyrinthine, the songs are sniper-sharp.

Steve Lilywhite, who was first to capture the band's anthemic thrill-power, is at the helm for about half of the new songs. Like the planned next single "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," these tend to be the tracks that reprise U2's high-octane garage band origins.

Having abandoned earlier sessions with producer Rick Rubin (who recaptured the greatness of Johnny Cash in his later years), U2 co-opted their previous collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois as writers and producers. It was an inspired move that has resulted in a series of songs that give the album its supple spine.

Some years ago Bob Geldof told me that Prince was the only artist whose work left him puzzled as to how he arrived at an unconventional song shape and an equally inventive production soundscape.

Many of the songs on No Line on the Horizon display similar attributes. Regular compositional structures are overturned, yet songs build from one memorable hook to another as U2 push a few boundaries.

The effect is to create layers of mystery which gradually unfold to reveal some brushstrokes of great beauty. Essentially, U2 are a guitar, bass and drums band. They retain the spark that's ignited the rock 'n' roll fire from The Yardbirds to Television. But they've developed a communal imagination and group mindset that enables them to curate a song as a piece of contemporary art as much as to blast it out like primitive rockers.

They retain the arty curiosity that gave an added dimension to their earlier work. But they have become more surefooted, more confident in their risk-taking.

The writing in these new songs confirms the band's place as important voices. Like a new car design or a new piece of software, this album is a richly-textured and sleek machine that marries smart technology and human emotion.

From the cover photo by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto to the album's abrupt ending, there's a studied artistic awareness at work throughout No Line on the Horizon that few popular music artists can approximate.

But ultimately, as the saying goes, it's only rock 'n' roll. However, in this case it's rock 'n' roll that alludes to something greater.

If No Line on the Horizon isn't ultimately rated alongside The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby as one of a triumvirate of superlative U2 albums, then I'll be eating my pork-pie hat.


1: No Line on the Horizon

It's the tremendous sonic dynamics that grab you as the bass and drums lock into an irresistible Madchester beat and carries on with a rising lift that oozes optimism as Bono sings, "She said, 'Infinity is a great place to start'."

2: Magnificent

Larry's snare drum builds in dramatically before a familiar chiming guitar sound stamps U2 on the the song.

3: Moment of Surrender

A gorgeous soulful mid-tempo song that seems destined to be covered by hundreds of other artists. Huge synthesized bass sound and heartfelt vocal as Bono sings about "playing with fire till the fire played with me."

4: Unknown Caller

A warm New Orleans-style undertow to a song that doesn't reveal itself too soon.

5: I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight

Will work brilliantly on a stadium stage. A further example of the band's unformulaic approach to writing.

6: Get On Your Boots

A powerhouse track that shakes up the album when it rattles in.

7: Stand Up Comedy

A monster riff from The Edge on a song that kicks the album to a different level of fun and excitement. More thought-provoking lines. 'Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady..."

8: Fez - Being Born

Atmospheric soundscape intro leads to an example of how well U2 have refined their trademark stylistic musical motifs.

9: White As Snow

Due on the soundtrack of Jim Sheridan's Iraq war film, Brothers, this sparse and haunting hymn is where performance artist Laurie Anderson meets alt-country and even at 4.39 seems short.

10: Breathe

Ushered in by a guitar buzzing like a swarm of angry bees, this is demented rock 'n' roll with Bono in holy-roller mode invoking bizarre images including, "I'm running down the road like loose electricity while the band in my head plays a striptease."

11: Cedars of Lebanon

Like a prize-winning short story, this has an insightful documentary feel that makes it the perfect coda to the album.

The writing here is brilliant and, as throughout, the playing shows a band at the height of its powers.

It's the tremendous sonic dynamics that grab you as the bass and drums lock into an irresistible Madchester beat and carries on with a rising lift that oozes optimism as Bono sings, "She said, 'Infinity is a great place to start'."


© Herald.ie, 2009.

Originally posted by guardian
White As Snow: U2's most intimate song

Bono's hymn to a soldier dying in Afghanistan is unadorned, evocative and suggestive. And you don't even have to know what it's about to feel its quiet power or sense its sadness
When I interviewed Bono in Dublin back in January, as part of my marathon tracking of the new U2 album, No Line On the Horizon, for Sunday's Observer Music Monthly, he described it as "essentially a big fat rock album". The most dramatic exception is a track called White As Snow, the quietest, most intimate, and arguably most arresting song that U2 have ever made.

"There are a couple of songs from the point of view of an active soldier in Afghanistan," Bono told me back in June 2008, at the group's Hanover Quay studio in Dublin, during a break in recording, "and one of them, White As Snow, lasts the length of time it takes him to die".

Of all the character songs on the album, White As Snow is the most moving. Much of this is to do with its sense of quietude – not a mood one normally associates with U2. The song is almost ambient in its musical pulse, suggesting the presence of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and Bono's voice sounds markedly different here, more restrained, more plaintive, the emotion suggested rather than strained for.

The song's melody is based on an old hymn, Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel, that, according to The Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, was composed by "an unknown author, circa 1100". (Surprisingly, the original has been faithfully covered by both Sufjan Stevens and Belle & Sebastian and, less surprisingly, by Enya and 2006's BBC Young Chorister of the Year, William Dutton).

The idea of a song based on the dying thoughts of a soldier initially came to Bono after he read William Golding's ambitious novel, Pincher Martin, which is told from the point of view of a British sailor who appears to have survived the torpedoing of his ship. As he approaches death, his thoughts roam back over his life, and the moral choices he made or avoided. (The novel's denouement, though, suggests that the soldier died at the moment his ship went down and that the preceding narrative recounts his soul's struggle to stay in the material world.)

After watching Sam Mendes's film, Jarhead, Bono decided the song should evoke the thoughts of a soldier dying from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Intriguingly, you don't really need to know the context for the song to work. It stands alone. Initially, I had assumed it was sung in the voice of a young Middle Eastern man who had been driven into exile, but there you go.

I am not typically taken with songs that require prior knowledge or context to be fully appreciated. I remember interviewing Elvis Costello on the release of his dense and difficult album, Spike, and being baffled even more by his explanations of the songs than the songs themselves. Springsteen, on the other hand – and, in particular, Springsteen the quiet balladeer – is a master of setting and context: "My name is Joe Roberts, I work for the state, I'm a sergeant out in Perrineville, Barracks number 8" . There is something about writing in character – putting yourself in someone else's place and seeing the world though someone else's eyes – that requires a certain craft and economy for that shift in perspective to be credible.

"We were going to start White As Snow with an explosion," recalled Bono. "An early version had this industrial noise that sounded like the aftermath of a bomb." Now, that would have been one way of getting around the problem of context. It may have worked, too, but the song is fine the way it is, unadorned, evocative, suggestive. You don't have to know what it's about to feel its quiet power or sense its sadness. "It's kind of pastoral,"
said Bono. It bodes well for the album that will follow No Line On the Horizon, which has, he says, "the idea of pilgrimage at its centre", and is made up of the "quieter, more meditative songs" that did not make it on to this one. "Intimacy is the new punk rock," Bono added, laughing. But is it the new stadium rock?

Originally posted by MWSAH:[..]

Originally posted by yeah:[..]