EXP
Active topics
  1. North Star and Every Breaking Wave musically and lyrically come from the BOMB era, so anybody who says that they love North Star and Every Breaking Wave and then says that Bomb is a terrible album is going to have some serious egg on their face.
  2. Originally posted by ahn1991:North Star and Every Breaking Wave musically and lyrically come from the BOMB era, so anybody who says that they love North Star and Every Breaking Wave and then says that Bomb is a terrible album is going to have some serious egg on their face.

    I don't say Bomb is a terrible album, I think it's great, other than a weird running order.

  3. Yeah... why they would put Miracle Drug right after Vertigo is beyond me. I would personally put CoBL after Vertigo because Vertigo --> Miracle Drug is kinda awkward.
  4. Originally posted by ahn1991:[..]

    Yeah... why they would put Miracle Drug right after Vertigo is beyond me. I would personally put CoBL after Vertigo because Vertigo --> Miracle Drug is kinda awkward.

    Yeah. To be honest I wouldn't have minded Miracle Drug not even being on the album. Replace it with Mercy and you have a freakin' masterpiece of an album.
  5. Originally posted by LikeASong:"I'd rather have an album of good to great songs that don't
    quite fit together than have a ok album that blends better."

    That's an interesting line, and although it may seem obvious, I'm sure there will be more peopoe than we think that disagree.


    I definitely prefer good songs rather than mediocre songs that fit well together.
    Which is why NLOTH (desipite its disparate mix of genres) was better than HTDAAB or October/Boy.
  6. 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)


    My point was that he hasn't been using his trademark echoey guitar that much on the last album. And I mean really, it's very, very difficult to come up with completely unique guitar tone that hasn't done before AND that still suits the song and doesn't sound gimmicky.
    I mean the guitar already by far has the widest variety of sounds, you don't hear people complaining that pianos sound too pianoey or violins to violiney.

    It's rather too much to expect Edge to come up with 5 or 6 completley unique guitar tones (eg. like the guitar riff in Numb or Lemon - that aren't just a variation on an established theme) for each and every album. He also has to write parts that suit the songs and out there effects might suit an album like Zooropa but not so much the more conventional songs.

    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.


    I don't know about that.

    I don't think they prewrite songs; they do all the work in the studio - you can certainly see that with UC, MoS & Magnificent which all came out of the Fez sessions and have the atmosphere of the place.

    You might say that NLOTH was overproduced and that could be true but we don't know what the alternative/early mixes of the songs were so we can't tell if they changed for better or worse. And certainly tracks like MoS were underproduced.

    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


    I don't agree, North Star is a good HTDAAB type tune but nothing truly stunning (at least not in the form played).
    As for Every Breaking Wave, it has a rather pathethic chorus and the overay structure and vocal melody are rather disjointed and not quite cohesive. Plus it also sounds like a HTDAAB tune (the lyrics for both songs are quite hammy at times)

    Now maybe the full studio versions are magnificent but the barebone guitar & vocal arrangements definitely don't seem like top 20 U2 songs to me.
  7. I agree that we can't expect Edge to come up with new guitar signatures each album, but you have to agree that he's been somewhat conservative with his tone over the past 12 years. Why should it be too much to expect to hear something like Numb and Lemon on the same album in terms of being that innovative in such a short time? It's happened many times before in albums of U2's past. He doesn't even have to get all strange with his tone. Just listen to A Sort Of Homecoming, Pride, Bad, and 4th of July. All on the same album, all radically different in terms of "feel", but all quite similar in terms of the effects processing. I'm not saying Edge should be able to come up with 11 different NEW guitar tones that will blow us all away, my main point was that echoing what Adam said. The echoey chimey guitar has been played out over the past little while and it's time to move on.

    For the record I didn't say they were pre-written, I said they sounded pre-written. And I still don't know why everyone gives it up for MOS so much, to me the version on the album sounds horrible. It got better live as the show closer but to me it really just doesn't sound that good. There's a difference between a voice sounding vulnerable and raw and emotional and sounding bad, and to me MOS walks somewhere in between those, not only on the one side.

    And I disagree about North Star and Every Breaking Wave with YOU sir! They're not top 20, but I think they beat pretty much everything on NLOTH and some of Bomb and some of ATYCLB. They were gems.
  8. ''Edge'' try all the the guitar tunes you love, backwards and mix em up then you'll find new tunes, or even the tunes you hate the most, try it backward, you may find something new,but somehow I think he may have already tried that
  9. Originally posted by vanquish:[..]


    I definitely prefer good songs rather than mediocre songs that fit well together.
    Which is why NLOTH (desipite its disparate mix of genres) was better than HTDAAB or October/Boy.

    NLOTH had Stand Up Comedy, which I think may have ruined the entire album for me...

    But if you want to talk about albums that not only flow well but also had great songs, ATYCLB stands right up there. Granted, I ended up enjoying the single versions of Walk On and Elevation more than the album versions, all the other songs on the album are great and definitely fit the general feel of the album. I listened to ATYCLB as a whole again and I think I've really fallen in love with it again.
  10. Originally posted by ahn1991:North Star and Every Breaking Wave musically and lyrically come from the BOMB era, so anybody who says that they love North Star and Every Breaking Wave and then says that Bomb is a terrible album is going to have some serious egg on their face.

    Then somebody better hand me a towel, cause I'm not moving.
  11. What if Edge wrote the new album while Bono does his charity work?
  12. ^ Couldn't be worse than much of the output on ATYCLB and Bomb.

    They should get a new producer - Trent Reznor - and start working on something better than Pop. I could imagine this new U2 album with a total orchestral backing on every track, electronic undertones, with guitar solos on every single track, piano, multiple layers of drums and loads of weird keyboard effects.

U2start is run by fans for fans. Help us reduce personal costs. Consider to make a donation to support us.
U2start is run by fans for fans. Help us reduce personal costs. Consider to make a donation to support us.
U2start is run by fans for fans. Help us reduce personal costs. Consider to make a donation to support us.
U2start is run by fans for fans. Help us reduce personal costs. Consider to make a donation to support us.