In the midst of a week residency on Late Night with David
Letterman, on the eve of announcing a massive fall tour of
football stadiums, and in the wake of Tuesday’s release of No
Line on the Horizon, U2 should feel on top of the world.
Instead, everything about the Irish rock band suggests the come
down, the hangover.
The past decade’s Christmastime releases of three greatest hits
packages, a digital box set, and numerous concert DVDs are a sign
to U2’s true believers that their favorite foursome has made the
regression from a relevant it band to a greatest hits
act. If all that didn’t make the point, then the group’s new
album, No Line on the Horizon, and the near five-year
gap between releases that introduced Bono to a new generation of
potential fans as a politician rather than a pop star, certainly
will.
To be sure, reviewers have queued up on cue to fawn. No Line
on the Horizon, according to Rolling Stone, is
“their best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic
grip, since 1991’s Achtung Baby.” If the sentiment
sounds familiar, it is because you may have read the same review
in Rolling Stone for any number of late-period U2
efforts. The magazine, after all, dubbed All That You Can’t
Leave Behind the group’s “third masterpiece” and claimed,
“With Pop, they’ve defied the odds and made some of the
greatest music of their lives.” Call it the
lifetime-achievement-award method of reviewing records, in which
the band’s overall corpus of music rather than the CD under
review dictates the tenor of the critique. The reviewer, like the
reviewed, plays it safe.
Playing it safe is ruinous to an artistic endeavor in which
reinvention has served as the lifeblood. The lineup and Larry
Mullen Jr.’s haircut have stayed the same. Everything else
changed.
From the get-go, U2’s songs obsessed over the two topics to be
avoided in polite company: religion and politics. “Gloria,” “I
Will Follow,” and “Forty” come across more as prayers than as
songs. The lyrics for the 1983 album War seem culled
from the headlines, with songs about nuclear annihilation
(“Seconds”), inspired by the Solidarity movement (“New Year’s
Day”), and lamenting Ireland’s protracted unrest (“Sunday Bloody
Sunday”).
Then, the raw, post-punk U2, with the aid of producers Daniel
Lanois and Brian Eno, etched a layered soundscape of ethereal
keyboards and haunting background vocals on 1984’s The
Unforgettable Fire. The U2 of “A Sort of Homecoming,” “The
Unforgettable Fire,” and “Elvis Presley and America” were not the
same band that performed “I Will Follow” and “Gloria.” The band
wasn’t so much evolving as it was becoming a new species. Swerves
followed this initial swerve, with the bandwagon perpetually
adding and losing passengers.
When self-indulgent stage sermons and hosannas to aging rock gods
wore thin on audiences, Bono informed fans at a 1989 New Year’s
Eve concert that the band would “go away and dream it all up
again.” Achtung Baby’s sonic makeover replaced
angry-young-man earnestness with jaded irony, the influence of
America with Europe, and the sound of roots rock with fuzzed-out
guitars, distorted vocals, and club beats. The 1991 album was, as
Bono termed it, “four men chopping down The Joshua
Tree.” After experimentation veered too dramatically from
mainstream tastes in the mid-1990s, with Island Records finding
one album so commercially unviable that U2 released it under the
“Passengers” moniker so not to undermine their brand, U2 opted
for an identikit U2 sound on All That You Can’t Leave
Behind (2000) and How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
(2004). It was U2 playing U2, if you will.
No Line on the Horizon is U2 playing U2 too, only this
time around the U2 self-imitation also encompasses the
experimental version of the band heard on Zooropa (1993)
and Pop (1997). The pretension of experimentation, as it
too follows a template, further strips the album of credibility,
making it staler than their two previous victory laps.
No Line on the Horizon is, in a word, uninspired.
Lyrically, it’s about what one would expect from someone on
sabbatical from saving the world. It is also sonically
pedestrian, which would be more understandable had The Edge,
Larry Mullen Jr., and Adam Clayton spent their time earning
Time’s “person of the year” honors, hob-knobbing with
presidents, getting knighted by the Queen of England, and writing
a column for The New York Times.
Even on past U2 albums that missed the mark, there was always
something to admire: the anthemic quality of “Walk On,” the
soaring beauty of “City of Blinding Lights,” the wit of “The
Playboy Mansion,” the passion exploding in “All I Want Is You.”
None of that, which salvaged the LP offerings that weren’t
masterpieces, salvages No Line on the Horizon.
Had U2 been a younger act, an Interscope executive would have
undoubtedly sat them down to deliver the five scariest words in
the music industry: “I don’t hear a single.” The nursery-rhyme,
sing-along single, “Get on Your Boots,” sounds reminiscent of
“Elevation” or “Vertigo”—arena-friendly singles from the previous
two albums—only redone with trippy beats and electronic effects.
The recidivism likely explains its debut on the Billboard Hot 100
at #37, fall to #96 the following week, and subsequent
disappearance altogether. Worse still for a band known as much
for its deep album cuts (and even B-sides) as its singles, No
Line on the Horizon contains no hidden gems, just a string
of listenable tracks such as “Breathe” and “Magnificent.”
Twenty years ago Bono sang, “I don’t believe that rock ‘n’ roll
can really change the world/It’s just spins and revolutions,
spirals and turns.” This hasn’t stopped him from testing that
hypothesis from time to time.
U2 consistently putting out great records bought Bono audiences
with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Pope John Paul II, President George
W. Bush, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. Unfortunately, the
price of releasing long-delayed musical afterthoughts will ensure
fewer listeners — not only on the radio, in concert, and on
iPods, but in the Oval Office, the UN general assembly, and the
EU Parliament as well.
