Quite an Experience from U2
U2 Songs of Experience Interscope Records
Like its 2014 predecessor, U2’s Songs of Experience is the product of a drawn-out recording process. Much more so than Songs of Innocence, however, U2 has made a stage-ready album that doesn’t blush or blink in its use of the band’s signature sounds — The Edge’s chiming guitar, Adam Clayton’s trebly bass, Larry Mullen Jr.’s responsive drums and Bono’s heart-onhis-vocal-cords singing.
Songs of Experience was supposed to be completed “soon enough” after Songs of Innocence, but things kept getting in its way.
From the automatic iTunes download fiasco of Innocence, Bono’s debilitating bicycle accident three years ago and a more recent, yet-to-be-described health scare, plus the changing political landscape and the successful 30th anniversary tour of The Joshua Tree, sometimes the pause button was getting pressed.
As the band’s frontman, Bono has worn the ensemble’s colours most brightly — the Christian zeal, the obsession with technology and its excesses, the penchant for big statements, his immersion in the politics of the moment and his commitment to humanitarian causes. Some of those themes appear on Experience.
While the last two albums — the other was 2009’s No Line on the Horizon — had some strong songs, there was a sense of erratic dispersion, of the whole being less than its components.
The new record is thrilling because U2 sounds fully integrated again, a band with everyone in the same groove.
Swan Lake-like strings launch opener Love Is All We Have Left, as Bono duets with his own electronically modified voice on another of his typically zeitgeist ballads.
Breaking the musical mood if not the lyrical one, Bono seems to relive his bike crash on Lights of Home as the distorted acoustic guitar and cymbal splashes give way to an emotional solo from The Edge and a gospel-like ending with assistance from Haim, who also get co-credit for the music.
You’re the Best Thing About Me has more of U2’s DNA of thumping drums and ringing guitars but the message is ambivalent — you’re magnificent, but I’m leaving anyway. Kendrick Lamar raps on the transition between Get Out of Your Own Way and American Soul, not really integrated in either, and Lady Gaga sings backing on Summer of Love.
Red Flag Day references the migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea and The Showman could be a Bono mini-biopic. Closer 13 (There Is a Light) pairs with the opener as the album bookends Bono’s most vulnerable moments.