|
|
VIDEOS
|
New Album Info: Reviews General / Articles / Reviews / Singles / Videos / Booklet (Page 1)(Page 2)(Page 3)(Page4)(Page 5)(Page 6) (Page 7)(Page 8) Rolling Stone
- 11/9/00 By James Hunter U2's tenth studio album and third masterpiece, All That You Can't Leave Behind, is all about the simple melding of craft and song. Their first masterpiece, 1987's The Joshua Tree, imagined cathedrals of ecstasy; their second, 1991's Achtung Baby, banged around fleabag hotels of agony. But on All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 distill two decades of music-making into the illusion of effortlessness usually only possible from veterans. The album represents the most uninterrupted collection of strong melodies U2 have ever mounted, a record where tunefulness plays as central a role as on any Backstreet Boys hit. "I'm just trying to find a decent melody," Bono sings with soulful patience in "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "a song that I can sing in my own company." Since they shot out of Ireland in 1980, U2 have believed that pop could sing like angels and move like the devil. They have always known devoutly that studio style facilitates meaning. It's why they have always seemed so modern - this conviction that their sonic play of shades, textures, levels and dissolves amounts to more than an end in itself. This belief has always loomed enormously for U2, from the beat-oriented hummable songs of their first albums, which warmed up New Wave's chilly airs, to the largesse of their War-period arena performances, to their engagement with the geniuses of U.S. roots music, through to their itchy recastings, on Achtung Baby, of transcontinental love and panic. This restlessness reached a high point in 1997, when U2 released Pop, an album dipped in club music and dead set on ironic kicks. Now, after spending twenty years pushing different styles through the roof, on All That You Can't Leave Behind they table everything except that which now seems most crucial: the songs themselves. All That You Can't Leave Behind flexes with an interior fire. Every track - whether reflective but swinging, like "Wild Honey," or poised, then pouncing, like "Beautiful Day" - honors a tune so refined that each seems like some durable old number. Because this is U2, there's a quick impact to these melodies, yet each song has a resonance that doesn't fade with repeated listening. The melodies mirror the album's production, which is carried off with seeming invisibility by seasoned U2 hands Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, with Steve Lillywhite showing up for a few mixes. Everything coheres in a kind of classically U2 sonic clench: "Walk On" addresses perseverance and reward in its lyrics, but the song is really about its minor-key dance of guitars and rhythms, vocal yearning and hope. "Kite" is about the plight of a fraying couple; when Bono glimpses "the shadow behind your eyes," his lyric evokes the music's slanted conversations of melody and rhythm and guitar figures. Bono's singing has lost some of the extra flamboyance it's had in the past, but it's as passionate as ever - by reigning himself in, he has invested his voice with a new urgency. All That You Can't Leave Behind gets serious about simplicity. The songs aren't obscured by excessive production, but the band doesn't commit the common sin of boring people silly in the name of scaling back. The Edge's guitars are even more self-effacing than usual, showing up only as conveyors of accent and texture. On "In a Little While," Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen sink deeply into an Al Green whisper-groove, a feat of complex plainness. On the very London pop tune "When I Look at the World," Christmassy synths and choruses achieve an earthy focus, as Bono taps the silver at the top end of his voice. U2 are no longer idealistic kids. In "New York," the album's penultimate moment, Bono sings as a man in "midlife crisis," desperately drawn to that city's unique brew of noise and reason, chaos and sensation. Scattered throughout the songs are references to having seen and felt and lived a lot. The band is still looking for what's essential, but on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the drama of the search exists right in the music itself, in the tension between rage and gentleness. On "Grace," Bono highlights a girl who "makes beauty out of ugly things." All That You Can't Leave Behind asks the same question again and again: What else in this damaged world would you spend time looking for? Amazon.com By Andrew Mueller If U2 hadn't used the title already, "A Sort of Homecoming" might have suited this, their 10th studio album. All That You Can't Leave Behind sounds, at various points, like any or all of U2's previous albums, as if the band is sending postcards back from a protracted ramble through previously conquered territories. The euphoric opening track, "Beautiful Day," reintroduces Edge's signature delay-laden guitar, which has been pretty much absent since The Unforgettable Fire. Elsewhere, the gospel stylings of Rattle and Hum resurface on "Stuck in a Moment," and the deranged, Prodigy-influenced dance textures that characterized 1997's Pop crop up on "Elevation." None of which suggest that this commendably restless bunch is running out of ideas. Having spent the '90s making three of the most bizarre and adventurous albums ever delivered by a stadium-rock band (the consecutive masterpieces Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop), it's as if they're now trying to figure out what is the one particular thing they've always done best. Based on the evidence presented here, their forte remains a facility for making the epic statement alongside Bono's increasing lyrical intimacy: "Walk On" and "Peace on Earth" are two of the best things he's ever written or sung. All That You Can't Leave Behind confirms that U2's laurels are still making them itch. Sunday (Irish) Independent - 10/22/00 By Barry Egan Situating U2 in 2000, it would be easy to dismiss them as also-rans as > flea-bitten, slightly smelly fossils from another era. Where do they go from here? After the 80 foot lemons and the facepaint, the Salman Rushdie cameos and the devil horns? After the techno blancmange of the last album, Pop, the great expectation was that U2's career would go downhill faster than Mary Harney on a bobsleigh. (When you get to the bottom, you go back to the top?) It hasn't. Caught between the linguistic savagery of the tabloids and the jitterbug attention span of MTV boyband culture to say nothing of their own fans where could U2 possibly go? Back to the Tom Verlaine guitars? Back to the white flags? Back to Ossie Kilkenny's house for a chat? It would be easy for U2 to take the complacent route ... But complacency is not within the band's nature. There is very much a sense on the new album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, of reaching out towards something else, a vision that Bono and his listeners alike see only inpartial glimpses. And in those glimpses, themes gradually unfold. Bono's fascinations remain constant. Mysteries emerge. (Is Ali Hewson the Grace of the song title? Is Peace On Earth an open letter to Gerry Adams?) Here, they scorch a trail that only Radiohead at a push can manage to keep pace with. On this evidence, Bono is still the star of the moment, more intriguing and adventurous than anyone in the mainstream. It isn't the return to the Big Music overloaded with grandiose importance. It's actually little music with big ideas: edgy, out-of-kilter, uber-soul music like the Velvet Underground produced by James Brown. Peace On Earth is one of the album's classics its yearning melody reminiscent of the stark beauty of John Lennon. "They're reading names out over the radio," Bono sings, the words rasping from the roof of his mouth like a sandstorm howling over bones. "All the folks the rest of us won't get to know. Sean and Julia, Gareth, Ann and Breda. Their lives are bigger bigger than any big idea." The autobiographical wit of lines like "Where I grew up/There weren't many trees/Where there was we'd tear them down/And use them on our enemies" soon fades with "Tell the ones who hear no sound/Whose sons are living in the ground/Peace on earth". In the end, Bono transforms its lament in a spirited quest, more in tune with his vision of despairing hope. This is Bono's epiphany after the dark night of the soul. Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of is a blissful, out-of-kilter splendour, Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno constructing a Phil Spector-like wall of sound round Bono's hazy, William Burroughs, bluesy drawl. The song is majestic and colossal yet Bono defuses pomposity by sticking his tongue between his lips and roaring campily: "At the corner of your lips/As the orbit of your hips/Eclipse you elevate my soul". Starting with a guitar riff that owes something to The Beatles and The Byrds, In A Little While is surely the most unassailably raw and soulful song U2 has this far in their 20 year career produced. "That girl, that girl is mine", Bono sings the ghost of Otis Redding past haunting his every syllable. From sobbing helplessness to flights of joy, In A Little While is Bono as perverted, deep soul rhapsodist. A neo-classic pop song with a switchblade-twisting cut to it, Wild Honey echoes the treasured oeuvre of The Beach Boys, The Velvets and The Pixies (the crafted understatement of Edge's guitar sounds on Wild Honey is overwhelming). The organ riff that zig zags through Kite is bittersweet and addictive, blending Edge's soaring sky-riffs with Bono's spiritual advice to the world: "You gotta stand up straight/Carry your own weight". And moments later: "I want you to know/That you don't need me any more/I want you to know that you don't need anyone/anything". Near the end of the song he descends even further into seeming self-doubt: "Did I waste it?/Not so much I couldn't taste it/Life should be fragrant/Roof top to the basement/The last of the rock stars ..." Like the troubled wiseman of a William Burroughs book, this is the sound of a man drifting through a night time Dublin, examining his place in the scheme of things his voice is a beautiful, raw sound that starts into song just where his throat opens into his mouth. Vocally, Bono is not histrionic (this is an important point because his > singing style was always criticised for being too Jesus Christ With Shades too preachy. The Prat In The Hat. The W---er With The Mullet Who Wanted To Save The World.) Instead, less is more. Notes dilate, coil and uncoil within phrases, but he always holds back from putting his bootheel on the ampstack and going complete bonkers (even when he is shouting to some unseen person: "I'm a man/Not a child/A man, who sees the shadow behind your eyes"). The resonance is never too ripe vibrato whirrs but never wavers from a taut reining. Two impulses seem to inhabit his voice: one gentle and bittersweet-sad, the other bursting like a volcano. What's beautiful now about Bono, the studio sultan of schzoid, is you can never predict if he's going to bawl or whisper. It is easy to forget that Bono's voice in 2000 could have become a bloated, mystic Elvis clogged, congested with its own messianic self-importance. Mercifully, it hasn't. Voices tell us something of the words they mould, tell of infinite potentialities of sensation which are perhaps quite inaccessible to language. After all, why would a man sing if he could truly speak what was on his mind. Ask Johnny Cash. Ask Billie Holiday. Ask Robert Johnson. ADD Bono to that illustrious list. Kite, In A Little While and Peace On Earth show just how much and how far the North Dubliner's voice has developed and matured on this album. Certainly, on Grace, Bono's voice is immaculate, pure in love even. Sticky, shiny and obstinate as a half-sucked sweet, Grace is a public love letter to someone in Bono's life ("What left a mark/No longer stings/Because Grace makes beauty/out of ugly things"). Other times, like on the psychedelic mind scrabble of New York, Bono leans first on the slack tempo then bites into melody; shouts suddenly in a louder voice. In the second part, he dismantles the mood, pricks the pretty bubble of the tune and seems about to heft it asunder but then he relents and the theme ("Irish, Italian, Jews and Hispanics/Religious nuts, political > fanatics in the stew") is rebuilt again with different accents into > something harder, terser. At once violent, livid and vibrant, but most assuredly alive, Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of is equally inspired and slightly mad coming on like white-boy Sly & The Family Stone. Previous U2 albums have dealt with bigger issues enmity (War, 1983); the imminent big bang (The Unforgettable Fire, 1984); friends departed (The Joshua Tree, 1987). All That You Can't Leave Behind follows on from Achtung Baby (1991) in that it deals directly with themselves. Matching their maverick output with an intuitive grasp of the history of music and image-making, U2 have moved forward here in a manner which will surely dumbfound their detractors. So: in the final analysis, All That You Can't Leave Behind leaves everything in its wake. Listening to it you don't think of Radiohead's Kid A album, you think of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper, The Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street, Sly & The Family Stone's There's A Riot Going On. I do not mean to imply for a minute that All That You Can't Leave Behind is in any way a retro album but rather that this album echoes the seminal ambition and timeless excellence of what those bands did at their height. On All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 strive and, for the most part, achieve that ambition. Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo) - 10/26/00 U2 is back--not back in the sense that this is the band's first studio album since 1997's Pop, but in the sense that the four Irish lads who gave the world The Joshua Tree are back after a 13-year hiatus. Not since that 1987 masterpiece has Bono sung from on high like he does here, delivering all the glory of U2's best anthems and mining the depths of their more subdued, introspective moments. And it's all done with such stripped-down, well-crafted song writing that the album sounds somehow familiar even on first listen. "I'm just trying to find a decent melody," Bono sings on "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "A song I can sing in my own company." U2 have provided several here. The album opens with "Beautiful Day," a sung-from-the-knees anthem about searching for meaning and hope amid the increasing complexity of modern civilization. Not since "Where the Streets Have No Name" has a song been better suited for singing from the rooftops. From there to the mantra-rap exploration of midlife crisis in "New York," the album runs through the emotional spectrum, all perfectly shaded by vintage Edge on guitars. A big part of the reason for the album's success is that the Edge has gone back to the inventive guitar sounds that defined the U2 of old. The layered jangle of War, the major-chord swing of "Desire," the minimalist textures of "Bad": all of them are revisited here, but with the matured restraint one would expect of a band that burst onto the scene a full 20 years ago. Bono's voice has surrendered a little off the top over the years, but where it breaks up it does so nicely. He uses this to great effect on tracks like "Walk On," a song about Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi that finds U2 drawing on the political passions that drove so much of their earlier work. In a word: Masterpiece. The Village Voice - 10/25/00 By Eric Weisbard I've played the Radiohead album about a dozen times, pushed my way in to see them live, and yes, there is a certain pleasure to be had from Kid A. What seems at first like rote, enfeebled antirockism reveals a jittery, cohesive undercurrent. Unlike most electronica, it offers the band feel of instruments set against one another. Hard-learned musicality substitutes for obvious hooks. Thom Yorke's anagrammed vocals may not always track, but his need to extend his voice out over the chasm is never in question. The unintended lesson is this: Wander over to the dark side of the moon and you'll find yourself more deeply reminded of rock's satisfactions than ever. But there's an even more remarkable side effect that no one's talking about. Once you've taken the Kid A Kool Aid, rerouted your sonic subconscious, albums you had previously dismissed as too dull to deserve another spin start to sound really really good. I mean, you can obsess on intricate dynamics with anything: It's like trying to spot freckles. PJ Harvey's own antirockist detour, Is This Desire?, used to strike me as too quiet and too endless. Now I hear intense, roiling textures—ant farms of miniaturism! U2's Pop may have been the final gasp of the Achtung Baby irony-quest. Suddenly, those disco guitars come off as meaty, and if Radiohead's new "Optimistic" ranks with OK Computer's "Karma Police," "Staring at the Sun" must be as moving as Achtung Baby's "One." What, I shouldn't compare Bono with the finely wrought Yorke? Like that Kid A "sucking on lemons" routine isn't a reference to Zooropa's "Lemon." Thankfully, the real news of the impending holiday season, for those who prefer their fun fun and their jingle bells rung, is that U2 and Polly Harvey are back among the giving. All That You Can't Leave Behind returns to the grand gestures of old. Practically every song a potential hit single. Soulful, exuberant, at peace with its own clichés, this is one U2 record that will never be called antianything. As for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, it embraces rock guitar again with the same gulping pleasure with which Harvey is for once embracing her man. And not the thickly clumped postpunk guitar of her early work, necessarily: The ringing riff on the lead track, "Big Exit," reminds me of "Last Train to Clarksville," of all things. Not a lot, maybe, yet even provoking the thought is a breakthrough. Harvey has faced a dilemma ever since the To Bring You My Love tour, when she unveiled a diva's vocal heft and proved she could coax sounds out of side musicians as pointed as those she'd pick herself. Live, the Howlin' Wolf of her era (however Saville Row her clothes) can turn a nonalbum B-side into "Born to Run" or "Sunday Bloody Sunday," as she did with "Somebody's Down, Somebody's Name" and the unknown "This Wicked Tongue" at a brief CMJ gig at the Bowery Ballroom last Thursday. But on record, the illusion wears off. Placing blame for that is a chicken-and-egg game. Since, unlike U2 and Radiohead, she's never achieved a radio smash or an international following, her urge to grandiosity has gradually come to seem more and more contrived, like the myth-drenched morbid streak she shares with Nick Cave. Stories From the City offers some sacrificial lambs to the doubters. "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" feels like one trip to the wasteland too many, and "Big Exit" starts off sounding so fresh it's a bring-down to hear her revert to character with "I want a pistol/I want a gun." "Kamikaze" has the tug-of-war rhythms of a Rid of Me outtake. Only, c'mon, Rid of Me is one of the best rock albums of all time. If she's fast and loud enough, or finding new ways to shiver my timbers the way a sustained toy-keyboard tone flattens and elevates "A Place Called Home," I don't really care what she's singing. That's Thom Yorke in focus on the lovers' duet "This Mess We're In," one of several tracks as unproblematically inviting as anything she's ever done. "Good Fortune" shakes like Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot" or Hole, with Harvey diddling her vibrato to match. Credit for her loving mood supposedly goes to an extended stay in New York, which in Harvey's romantic haze is all Woody Allen and no Martin Scorsese. "You Said Something" takes a waltzing twirl around moon-drenched rooftops; if it's too easy to call it a U2 song (they do have an even drippier new one called "New York"), how about INXS? Yet Harvey never resorts to overproduction: She goes after this magic moment with the same artfully calibrated intensity she brought to making that other fellow lick her injuries. Then she gushes over anyway, on "This Is Love," both the punkest and the happiest song of the year. But neither she nor anyone else can match U2 for sustained pleasure this time out. U2 don't rely on projecting bandness anymore the way Radiohead still do, and they've no single genius like Harvey. They're an organization. Four band members, venerable producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno (Radiohead want to explore ambient textures? U2 have the master working their synthesizers!), Steve Lillywhite recalled for some timeless pop gloss. Plus a dozen other techs, and I'd bet Team U2 includes nutritionists and sports therapists too, like Team Navratilova. It ought to be too cumbersome for words, let alone music. Well, long live corporate rock. All That You Can't Leave Behind begins with "Beautiful Day," a rocker in their oversaturated '90s style but with Edge's guitar sound restored, effective because instead of lingering over gimmickry it just bullies ahead. "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of" is churchly bliss, Bono testifying over his beloved Philly soul; "Elevation," nothing but shimmy-shammy, big-beat chords and falsetto hoots. "Walk On" is an inspirational message that's never belabored; same for "Kite," which has this looped string bit keeping cool while Bono lets go about "who's to say where the wind will take you." "In a Little While" and "Wild Honey" are calmer, savoring vintage pop-rock like old friends. Though it's downhill from there, with "Peace on Earth" and "New York" too much to take and "When I Look at the World" and "Grace" not quite striking, seven fantastic songs in a row wins my vote. Call it their R.E.M. album, monster rock filtered through a sophisticate's restraint. Or look back further, to the 1970s vocal Brian Eno albums that preceded his ambient work and surpass it in quality if not influence. Even an outtake from that era, like his "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," combines the futurism and reverence U2 are trading on. It's not that they've regressed, or conceded an error: Keyboards still dominate this mix, Bono still hasn't found what he's looking for, and the zero-gravity sound separations invented for Achtung Baby still keep the genre touches floating. But as with Harvey, who on some level has finally made the Patti Smith album everyone always expected of her (inevitable joke: "Horses in My Dreams"), the lesson is that there's plenty gold left in them there rock-and-roll hills. Veins galore. That doesn't invalidate Kid A, obviously; it's better than Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, launched to the same gushing praise last year. But it amazes me how every time some burnt-out rocker goes experimental, the results are accorded automatic deference. And not just from critics: Check through some of the staggering 843 comments to date, many lengthy, that Amazon has received on Kid A—electorate divided, but the majority of the opinion that if Radiohead have another OK Computer stored up for release next spring, well, fine, but Kid A is more important. Really? Never the biggest U2 or arena rock fan, I find all my sympathies with the residue of pop aspiration Bono so righteously titled All That Can't Be Left Behind. It'll be interesting to see how many others do too, whether today's collective lemon sucking passes at the first hint of sweeter fruits. "You act like you never had love/And you want me to go without," Mr. B once sang, on an overblown number full of generalities that became as much a standard as anything written in the 1990s. It's not a bad thing that rock no longer exerts hegemony. U2 are no longer required to carry themselves as saviors or anti-Christs to make a great album. PJ Harvey needn't travel hell and high water to bring you her love. They just have to remember what turned them on about this stuff in the first place. Can you? |
