U2 takes its fans down street less traveled
a lack of cohesiveness and energy as well, and a struggle to connect with a crowd that didn’t know all the words to the songs.
U2 is a band that has always seemed able to manipulate its audience to emotional highs at will. At times on Monday, both the band and the paying customers seemed adrift.
The dissonance between the two shows suggest some kind of existential crossroads for U2, one of the last sure-thing arena rock bands still touring. They arguably have four different golden eras, and enough great songs to string crowdpleasing anthems together over two shows — and still have an “Exit” or “The Fly” left over.
And yet U2, or at least frontman Bono, still has new things to say. Last year’s “Songs of Experience” was delayed and rewritten as a more personal album after Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, both of which were referenced frequently during Monday’s reflective concert.
U2 first appeared on Monday night as apparitions on the big screen, with a strobe effect that occasionally lit up the real band members (the only fleeting proof that someone was actually playing the songs). The ethereal first two tracks, “The Blackout” and “Love Is All We Have Left,” were the strongest of eight “Songs of Experience” tracks played during the night.
The four members of U2 walked between two stages on opposite ends of the floor, with a caged moving catwalk that acted as sort of a spine in the middle, supporting a video screen that was big enough to land a Cessna airplane. Clever visual tricks, such as a sprint through Bono’s childhood neighborhood during the 2014 song “Cedarwood Road,” kept some of the less popular songs interesting.
But just three shows into the tour, there were signs that more fine-tuning is needed. The best part of the Edge’s guitar work — that gauzy layer of textural playing that swaddles some of the band’s best songs — was frequently inaudible because of overamplified bass and vocals. U2’s constant movement, with singer Bono often a long Frisbee throw away from the rest of the band, dulled the propulsiveness of the unit.
At one point Bono yelled, “San Francisco!” — which is the last thing a San Jose resident wants to hear on their home ice. (As long as we’re shouting out cities an hour’s drive from the SAP Center, why not give some love to Prunedale and Manteca?)
And yet the band was never more than two songs away from redemption. A middle-ofthe-set trio of U2’s hardest-rocking one-word songs — “Elevation,” “Vertigo” and “Desire” — kept the crowd in a sustained roar.
After performing the entirety of “The Joshua Tree” last year at Levi’s Stadium, U2 didn’t play a note from their best-selling album.
An acoustic “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “Beautiful Day,” “One” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” represented the greatest hits, but they were outnumbered by some welcome rarities, including “The Ocean” off first album “Boy,” and “Until the End of the World” and a searing and urgent “Acrobat” off the band’s most brazen album, “Achtung Baby.”
As if that wasn’t enough extra effort, someone took the time to fly a drone over San Jose, and include the footage on the video screen for “City of Blinding Lights.” Then the band finished as they started, with the sober and not-at-all-optimistic “13 (There Is a Light).”
“If there is a dark/ Now we shouldn’t doubt/ And there is a light/ Don’t let it go out.”
It’s doubtful anyone was singing that on the way out of the SAP Center parking lot, but this wasn’t that kind of performance. There were twice as many slow parts as the typical U2 concert. And there were three times as many surprises.