U2’s new album is far from The Joshua Tree
U2’s latest album is a mix of ‘good cop/not much cop’. It’s far from a dud, but...
If experience has taught U2 anything, is that they live and learn. They adapt, survive and usually thrive. You can buy Songs of Experience on December 1. You won’t get it for free on your Apple device – no such attempt at largesse this time. Lesson learned.
The album’s release, delayed to allow U2 to change the tone to reflect Trump’s presidency, Brexit and other political events, seemed a sensible move. It increased anticipation of the sermons from the Mount Temple alumni.
When Bono sings ‘All we have is immortality’ on the opening track, Love Is All We Have Left, it can be seen as him musing on the band’s artistic legacy. The track is unlikely to be cherished as it ponders existence itself in an electronically-treated vocal.
The dirty guitar riff that her- alds Lights of Home brings life to proceedings. It builds to a pleasing crescendo with Bono singing ‘Free yourself to be yourself. If only you could see yourself ’.
The standard is maintained with You’re the Best Thing About Me where a tongue-in-cheek Bono sings: ‘Shooting off my mouth is another great thing about me.’
Get Out of Your Own Way seems to be on a similar trajectory to Beautiful Day, before settling for a drizzly one in Killiney. It segues into American Soul with Kendrick Lamar declaiming: ‘Blessed are the bullies because one day they will have to stand up to themselves.’ Bono sings: ‘It’s not a place. This country is to me a sound of drum and bass’ as the band lock into a scuzzy stomp.
There are exhortations not to believe lies and to welcome refugees. It might be the most direct comment on Trump, but it could also apply to almost any country at any time. It’s not Bono’s fault the album has come too early for his appraisal of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Summer of Love hangs on a beefy bass riff by Adam. It’s simple, underpinned by the minimum of percussion by Larry and a dreamy guitar line by Edge.
Red Flag Day has some of the charm of Party Girl, but punches in places where all it needed to do was pause for breath.
Although they seem to have tastefully appropriated the riff from Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane for The Showman (Little More Better) there is little to recommend the track to the memory.
The album had by now settled into a sequence of good cop/not much cop. The Little Things That Give You Away is the former. The show-stopping slow track finds Bono at his most introspective, although Edge’s chopping guitar really doesn’t suit the mood of it.
The Landlady is very poor. She and it should be evicted. ‘Space. Her place is where I found my parking space’ is one of the weakest couplets Bono’s ever written.
The Blackout may work well live but, although Edge injects oomph and Larry and Adam are as strong as girders, it is just a solid workout.
When you read the title, Love Is Bigger Than Anything in its Way, it might suggest to you a big armswaying anthem and you would be right.
The final track, 13 (There Is a Light) is a lullaby-like closer to an album that, by no means a dud, will cause sleepless nights to those who contend that U2 are still a really potent artistic force.
It is 30 years since The Joshua Tree, and they are a distance from such an artistic highpoint on Songs of Experience.