Originally posted by vanquish:My biggest issue with the band is that Bono has got a bit soft and lazy in his middle age.
His lyric writing tends to be quite cringeworthy these days, i'm not sure if he actually thinks it's good enough or maybe he's too busy with his save the world activities to spend time writing lyrics.
And i'm afraid with his obsession with their music being 'relevant' it's not going to improve. The quality of writing for the Spiderman musical also doesn't bode well.
I miss the poetry of the Bono of old, these days it's often the case that a U2 song even one with a generally high standard of writing is often let down by a hamfisted line or two (Moment of Surrender and Unknown Caller are perfect examples).
Unfortunately, it really does seem to be Bono that's the problem, the rest of the band seems to be going from strength to strength. NLOTH saw fantastic performances from Adam & Larry, they're actually getting better and of course Edge was absolutely brilliant.
So I'm sorry to say it, but Bono is letting the team down.
Originally posted by Genaro92U2:As much as I agree with you about Bono being "a problem" I personally feel that EDGE has gotten as lazy (or even more lazy perhaps) than Bono in terms of his playing. Magnificent, and MOS are examples to me where Edge should soar during the solo's but he ends up with a simple wimper imo. He's all but absent on the last album and i'm worried he's going to just be doing minimalist playing that isn't all that good/interesting in the end
Originally posted by vanquish:I completely agree about Disappearing Act - it's definitely one of the best things they've done in recent years and the lyrics are fantastic ( though I wonder if the lyrics were brand new or unfinished from the TUF sessions.)
So maybe Bono can still write poetry if he wants to, but just doesnt put in the effort? Perhaps his standards have dropped since he only has to compete with all the inane, superficial songwriting these days.
I disagree about Edge, while ATYCLB and HTDAAB were full of his trademark chiming guitar on NLOTH we heard a diverse range of guitar textures and effects. GOYB, NLOTH, Fez- Being Born, Stand Up Comedy, Cedars of Lebanon and White as Snow all have distinctive guitar sounds.
And the Unknown Caller solo is unquestionably one of his best (if not his best).
Edge has never been a gunslinger guitarist, he's always been a minimalist so he's not going to burst out in a 2 minute solo every song. But I agree that his solo on Magnificent could be less repetitive (though he did change it up at the end of the 360 tour), as for MoS, his solo goes nowhere but that's because they foolishly only did one take of the song and put that on the album, and Edge is clearly not great at improvising solos.
And with his 'echoey' guitar the real issue with it is that it's so widely imitated - Coldplay, the Killers, Arcade Fire, Temper Trap, KoL etc. and pretty much every other indie/alternative rock band borrow liberally from Edge.
No one complains about all the classic rock / garage bands all having the same reliance on distortion and overdrive for their songs and they've been doing that since the 70s.
just an idea) Originally posted by RattleandHum1988:[..]
NLOTH was all fuzz, much like Elevation, bits of New York, Love and Peace, and so on. Stand Up Comedy is just a riff with some distortion on it, it's cool riff but the song falls HUGELY flat with the lyrics and lack of doing anything musically intriguing. Probably the most interesting part is the part that (supposedly) Dallas played guitar on. White as Snow is straight up acoustic like a ton of songs they've written in the past ten years. I'll give you the others at a minimal value, but I still don't think he's changed up his style that much. And you are right in that a ton of guitarists don't change their style, just listen to an ACDC song from any album in the past 40 years and try to tell someone it doesn't sound similar to any other of their songs (apart from the Bon Scott and Brian Johnson thing). The same goes for many. However, we've always known Edge to be a guitarist that gets "restless", and never likes to get comfortable. U2 as a band has always been like that. I think at this point it's not only (apparently) Adam that's restless with his current tone, it's the fans too (at least I am). To me it's not even that it's imitated, because we all hear Edge when we hear those bands and it's not like they're covering any ground in his terroritory.
It almost seems like to me that the band hasn't meshed in terms of songwriting or something like that. To me the last few albums (apart from a few songs) sound like pre-written ideas that kind of get pieced together and produced, instead of music written from the ground-up in the loud room, improvised pieces that come from a real location or feeling. It's a lot of neat riffs and echoey guitar, crossed with similar vocal patterns and lyrics that sound like they're trying too hard to be clever at times. That being said, if anyone has a listen to North Star and Every Breaking Wave and tells me that those aren't the best pieces U2 has written in YEARS, we'll have to have fisticuffs over that one, because I think those are some of U2's most beautiful compositions that fans got the luxury of hearing during the tour. I almost wish they hadn't played them because come time to write and record the new album they might already be thinking "the fans have already heard this and we want to do something new, away from 360 and NLOTH". I loved those songs and wished they had evolved rather than fade out.