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New Album Info: Reviews General / Articles / Reviews / Singles / Videos / Booklet (Page 1)(Page 2)(Page 3)(Page 4)(Page 5)(Page 6)(Page 7)(Page 8) USA Today -
10/30/00 By Edna Gundersen All That You Can't Leave Behind is all that you can ask of great rock music. Simultaneously classic and contemporary, U2's 10th studio album exudes warmth, vitality and passion in 11 beautifully crafted songs that recall the Irish quartet's unfussy roots. But this is no lazy throwback. Thrilling excesses of the '90s — Achtung Baby 's chilly industrial-strength techno, Zooropa 's infectious affluenza attack, Pop 's club-culture kicks — have been distilled into smart accents and muted afterthoughts. Simplicity and soul are the forces steering All That 's sublime sonics. Each instantly hummable track is a melodic marvel of glorious clarity, complementing Bono's openhearted vocals and his most exquisitely hewn lyrics to date. Poetic but not preachy, direct yet evocative, his words suggest rich pictures and raw emotions without a single syllable of flab. Imbued with arena-ready drama, Bono's liquid falsetto and gritty baritone convey the humble yearning and lucid emotion of an Everyman, not a messiah. Nearly every song is a potential single, raising hopes that U2 can restore rock's presence on radio. The euphoric Beautiful Day is breathing fresh air into playlists choking on synthetic pop and seething rap-rock. Similar highfliers are stacked along the runway: funk-rocking Elevation, acoustic Wild Honey, hip-hopped and gospelized In a Little While, R&B-soaked Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of and streetwise New York. Produced with admirable restraint by mood gurus Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, All That homes in on the joy and excitement of flesh-and-blood musicians playing tangible instruments without special-effects squads and push-button gizmos. Bono's soothing wail, The Edge's hypnotic guitar signatures, and the lock-step, molten-groove rhythms of bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen have, like nature itself, an inexplicable synchronicity and organic grace that can't be genetically engineered. Denver Post - 10/29/00 By G. Brown With the ringing, anthemic sound of 1987's classic "The Joshua Tree," U2 became the closest thing to a consensus for Greatest Living Rock 'N' Roll Heavyweights. And then came the '90s. The band's three most recent albums - "Achtung Baby" (1991), "Zooropa" (1993) and "Pop" (1997) - were characterized by dense electronic add-ons, dance beats and ambient experiments. Followers still clutching to the old earnestness were heard muttering, "Please, God, no more big concepts and techno-pop invocations." Their prayers have been answered. "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (Interscope), due in stores Tuesday, finds U2 reclaiming its focus on live musicianship. "What's become a rare commodity is the presence of humanity and the feeling of people in a room, playing off each other," lead singer Bono said in a Yahoo! chat recently. "Beautiful Day," the first single, sounds good on rock radio - Bono booms the chorus over the Edge's echoing guitar, rich keyboard chording and layered harmonies. "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" is a slice of Philly soul. The song that comes closest to recalling the band's surging late'80s expression is "Walk On." These are tough commercial times for classic rock bands, but this deserves to be a hit. U2 will follow the release of the album with a U.S. tour of indoor arenas, expected to begin early next year. Look for a possible date at Pepsi Center in April. RTE Guide - 10/27/00 By Alan Corr Well it's not big and it's not clever, which has to come as quite a relief after U2's more recent output. In fact, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is a reaction to the sometimes desperate scramble of "POP" but also a bracing reaffirmation of how good U2 sound when they're stripped of studio artifice. As the lead singer has been saying, "There's no fireworks on it". Of course, we should be very afraid when a band of this magnitude start making albums about hanging around in airports, but let's face it, Bono has more frequent travel mileage than an FF minister for slurry quotas. And so we find him sketching ideas on the back of a 1st Class napkin far too many times on this album, with the result that tracks such as "New York" should have been flushed mid-flight altogether. There are also times when you badly want to tell Hewson to get down off that cross. But mostly, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is an understated album full of jaundiced reflection and warm little songs like "Wild Honey", "Grace" and the Ben E. King styled pining of "In A Little While". It is slow-paced, mid-tempo and only occasionally dull. However, this being Bono, we do get several state-of-the-universe addresses like the Seamus Heaney quote in "Peace On Earth", a song, which, like much of "All That You Can't Leave Behind" relies heavily on John Lennon's peacenik chic for lyrical guidance. That can't be all bad but the greatest song on "All That You Can't Leave Behind", and one of the greatest things U2 have ever written, is the second track, "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of". "I'm not afraid of anything in this world, there's nothing you can throw at me that I haven't already heard", sings Mr B in mock bravado as he berates some poor lost soul, most likely himself, for lack of faith in trying times. With a big rousing soul chorus and The Edge sounding like a one-man gospel choir, it's so magically catchy that it aches. It's followed by the head-shagging "Elevation", a near facsimile of The Breeder's "Cannonball", complete with falsetto whoops and nagging guitar riff. Nice nonsense verse too. Then we get "Walk On", with The Edge as Dave Gilmour, and sadly it's a meandering and confused piece of filler while "Kite" labours like a lame dog. Elsewhere, "In A Little While" filches a line from Van's "Brown Eyed Girl", lands one of Bono's greatest vocal performances and combines the right amounts of pisstake with passion. Surprises are all around too on "Wild Honey", a breezy song with aromatic acoustic rush and a great melody which might sound like the aftermath of a night on the tiles with The Eagles and Van Morrison. "When I Look At The World" starts quiet but explodes into a marvellous squall of guitar and closer, "Grace" (no, not Jeff Buckley or Jim McCann for that matter) is the most delicate and romantic the band have ever made. "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is hard to get over-enthusiastic about and there's a sense of treading water, but overall what we've heard is true - this is old U2 , hearts on our sleeves and, on several songs, veins throbbing on temples. With back-to-basics approach like this it is impossible to avoid blatant self-reference, but what band has more of a definitive "sound" than these guys? "Peace On Earth", intros like "One Tree Hill" and the chorus to our unwanted friend "New York" is a straight lift from "Rejoice". On the flipside of all that, however, "Beautiful Day" sounds nothing like A Ha's "The Sun Always Shines On TV", right? A poignant title, a non-ironic Bono and no Big Ideas, U2 have wiped the slate clean and found their old craving images underneath. They've also trampled on Brian Eno's box of tricks and returned from their decade of dance as learned rock'n'roll maestros with some old guitar tabs from the 80s and a drummer who likes to hit hard. It's like the 1990s never happened. This is a sorta homecoming alright. Undercover By Paul Cashmere U2's 10th studio album is initially going to get a mixed reaction. For the band who spent the 90's reinventing themselves, if anything 'All That You Can't Leave Behind' is the undoing of invention. 'All That You Leave Behind' is mellow. The hint to what was to come was last year's The Ground Beneath Her Feet from The Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack. That song (included on the Australian edition of this album) set the template. The first single Beautiful Day is as angry and aggressive as they get this time around. The only other hint of days gone by is New York. "I'm not
afraid of anything in this world, There's nothing you can
throw at me that I haven't already heard, I'm just trying
to write a decent melody, a song that I can sing in my
own company" Bono sings on Stuck In A Moment You
Can't Get Out Of. These few lines some up the entire
context of the album. Walk On gives birth to the title of the album 'the only baggage you can bring is all that you can't leave behind'. Again, another prophetic statement indicating that the 10th U2 effort is from a band content with its illustrious history but not prepared to rest on it. Kite is the big U2 ballad. Those of you who saw Popmart will be able to visualize this one more on a live stage than listening to it in the context of this album. Numerous U2 songs tend to require visual. This is one of them and offers an insight into the size of u2 as a band. "In the time when new media was the big idea" Bono sings. In A Little While is almost a Pt2 to Kite in melody. The format of this album starts to cement by the time you reach this halfway point and expectations of a Bullet The Blue Sky start to fade. The acoustic simplicity of Wild Honey is somewhat of a surprise on first listen, but for the purpose of this review, I've taken advise any have left all comments to after the third run through. Fact is, like a lot of great albums, it does take the depth of numerous listens to grab the true appeal and All That You Can't Leave behind is certainly one of those albums. That's a good thing. Albums that are great on first listen tend to burn just as quickly. Albums that take time to appreciate do hang around longer. This album certainly has longevity. The entire middle section of the album is sedate. Peace On Earth is about as preachy as Bono gets. "Jesus could you take the time to throw a drowning man a line, Peace on Earth" he prays. As we near the end of the album it's like Bono has said to The Edge "I've had my say, you can have some fun now". When I Look At The World and New York start to sound like a band again. New York even has an element of grunt to it. The final moment for most of the world is Grace, a tender track with the staple Lanois production style massaged by the Eno influence. Grace is equal to the best of u2's quietest moments. Australian fans have an encore track. The Salman Rushie worded The Ground Beneath Her Feet rounds off the Aussie release Wall of Sound By Gary Graff For a while, it seemed as though U2 was — quite deliberately — moving further and further away from its beginnings as an earnest rock group, alternately poking fun at but perhaps also falling prey to the hype. Dating supermodels? Wearing personalized cowboy boots and orange jumpsuits? What happened to the four Irish moppets wearing stretch pants, sporting floppy 'dos, and singing about "Sunday Bloody Sunday"? On this, U2's 12th album, the Irish rock heroes reposition themselves as modest troubadours merely making the music that's in their hearts. As frontman Bono sings on the second track, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "I'm just trying to find a decent melody/ A song I can sing in my own company." Of course, U2 has never been a band of modest ambitions; it spent the '80s making music to change the world and the '90s making music to change itself — losing a bit of its audience and vaunted stature in the process. Now, as the group starts its third decade, U2 has found what it's looking for is good music, songs that ring with melody and hooks — and meaning — while still weaving in some of the ambient and electronic textures it explored on releases such as Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop. The result is a richly crafted and filler-free pop album on which each song sounds like an individual work, calling to mind mid-period Beatles titles such as Rubber Soul. With the Edge's silvery guitar licks recalling U2's early trademarks, "Beautiful Day" soars with full, anthemic glory as Bono essays on the rewards of persevering through what appear to be hopeless situations. "Elevation" cranks with fuzzy guitar and industrial underpinnings, while the exuberantly layered "When I Look at the World" sounds like it's about to break into a jig at any point. U2 evokes the spirit of early '70s Van Morrison recordings in "Wild Honey," and vintage soul music is the touchstone for songs such as "Stuck in a Moment," "Walk On," and "Grace." But what would initially appear to be gentle musings for "Peace on Earth" turn cynical as Bono mourns tragedy — specifically a terrorist attack in Northern Ireland that killed 29 people. And the tone poem called "New York," whose looped beats and airy ambience make sure that U2 doesn't lose its avant-pop credentials, finds a narrator struggling "to figure out my mid-life crisis" but also exulting, amid Titanic imagery, that he's "still afloat." "The goal," Bono intones at another point of the album, "is elevation," and that's precisely what U2 achieves this time out. New York Post - 10/31/00 By Dan Aquilante Bono and the U2 boys knew everything was at risk when they started recording the 11 songs "All That You Can't Leave Behind." The album had to be great, because if it was only good or worse, everyone would have pecked U2 to death. U2 not only succeeded, they created a masterpiece. "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is the great U2 album of thundering rock anthems that fans have been waiting for since the early '90s. For this musical achievement, rather than reinventing themselves, U2 has instead rediscovered what made them famous. That's what U2 is getting at in the album's title. This time out the band's original music vision has been dusted off and polished by producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno - the men who aided U2 in engineering their soaring sonic textures which made "The Unforgettable Fire," "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby" among the most important works of the last 20 years. The songs on the new disc, as is U2 style, are personal and passionate. Flip near the end of the album to the song "New York" where the band tip-toes around the edge of storm and then dives head first into the hurricane of the melody. In the lyrics Bono tries on the shoes of a man who has tossed his own life aside to start again in New York, the Emerald city of strangers. But like Dorothy, the singer concludes Oz is nice, but there's no place like home. Then there's the I'm-no-good-for-you-song "Walk On." Here the Edge's guitarwork blends with bassist Adam Clayton's and drummer Larry Mullen's rhythm attack to create a sonic scape where Bono's poetic writing is able to blossom. In this song there is the wonderful turn of phrase "You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been, a place that has to be believed to be seen." Passages as tightly wound pepper this album. The album leaps to higher ground on the neo-gospel "Stuck In a Moment" where Bono takes us to church to bear witness to his message that says stand straight, know yourself and live life. It is inspired both lyrically and musically with a chorus that is difficult not to sing along with. Vocally Bono isn't as nimble as he was when he was a boy, but his delivery is stronger and he rekindled the fiery passion that was missing on the band's most recent disc "Pop." The tune "Elevation" with its Little Richard-esque yelps and sweeping, scaling vocal attack are testament to that. With just a couple of months left in 2000, U2 has created what will be considered by many to be the best album of the year. This is a no risk disc. Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel - 10/31/00 By Sean Piccoli Dance pop, greed rock, glitter and trash -- U2's cheeky phase lasted a decade and left some fans missing their favorite band, the heartfelt boys who cried Pride (In the Name of Love) and searched for meaning Where the Streets Have No Name. So when Dublin's Most Wanted rolled out a single, Beautiful Day, for the Summer Olympics, the gesture played like another torchlighting. It served notice that U2 could still throw its arms around the world (not every progressive rock band gets prime time on global television). The tune's rippling guitar hooks, the full-throated urging to seize that Day, also signaled a sort of homecoming: Here again were the carriers of The Unforgettable Fire. A new album launched on that platform -- natios united in peaceful endeavor and higher purpose -- is bound to shout reconciliation to anybody convinced that U2 had gone astray. All That You Can't Leave Behind (wink, wink), which hits stores today, does sound more like the prayerful guitar-rock combo from the '80s. But something is missing here. U2's earnest revival lacks the righteous fervor and the melodic energy of classics such as Gloria and I Will Follow. What remains are the band's chronic weaknesses: soaring notes rather than actual melodies and flat, aerial-view portraits of life on earth rather than telling, intimate observation. The last album, Pop (1997), may go down in history as U2's fallen souffle -- a failed attempt to parade and parody consumer culture in the digital age. But even that conceptual clunker had its moments, and song for song holds up no worse than Behind. New tunes including Grace and Peace on Earth, anthemic lullabies in vintage U2 style, are gorgeously arranged and reassuringly familiar, but lyrics and vocal lines slide off into acoustic space, blurry and indistinct. One almost misses the checkered alter egos that frontman Bono dreamed up in the '90s to put more color into his delivery. But in place of the evil "Mr. Mephisto" and showbiz slicker "The Fly" comes plain old Bono, waxing modest on the r&b sing-along Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of: "I'm just tryin' to find a decent melody/A song that I can sing in my own company." The tune is hummable, and Bono sings invitingly. It's the band that falls down. Stuck lags around the turns. Guitarist Dave "The Edge" Evans, drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton aim for a mellow spirit and wind up sounding slack. So to call U2's new album a return to Joshua Tree roots is to overlook its deficiencies -- there is little here that U2 hasn't done better on previous records -- and to overstate how far out on a limb the band had climbed. The number of certifiably out-there tunes from U2's "experimental" phase can be counted on one hand: The Fly, with its low-fidelity thrum; the geometric soul of Lemon; and the signal-jamming Mofo. The albums that spawned these -- Achtung Baby (1991), Zooropa (1993) and Pop (1997), respectively -- still hewed to U2's basic strategy of proclaiming the human condition over cathedral-sized hooks. The band piled on keyboards and sequencers, but the approach was avant-guarded, at most. Nor does U2 step all the way off the Discotheque floor this time out. The dance rocker Elevate wants to take you higher with fat, fuzzy guitar and a shout-out chorus, and it throws more sparks than most of the new album's 11 songs. The challenge, it turns out, was not to rediscover tradition. The challenge was to write good songs. U2 comes up short on that score. All That just ain't. Entertainment
Weekly - 10/30/00 By David Browne U2's current single, ''Beautiful Day,'' opens not with a bang but a murmur. Gray sky strings give way to a faint rhythmic pulse; slipping into the track like an errant husband coming home late, a hushed Bono paints a dreary picture of traffic jams, luckless circumstances, and sundry frustrations both everyday and cosmic. Then, suddenly, drummer Larry Mullen crashes in, and the song erupts into a euphoric bellow so uplifting ''Day'' was played during the recent Olympics telecast. We know it's a corny move, and U2 know we know; as the Edge unabashedly told Entertainment Weekly last month, the song has a ''classic U2 arrangement.'' But damn if it isn't effective. For a few minutes, one is transported back to 1988 -- a time when so much rock, be it mainstream, indie, or hair metalish, actually sought to be sonically and emotionally uplifting. For anyone still puzzling over 1997's half baked ''Pop,'' this type of U2 song is a welcome reversal of fortune. Even more startling in light of the band's seeming obsolescence, the mood of ''Beautiful Day'' rarely lets up for the remainder of the accompanying album, All That You Can't Leave Behind. It's as if the band -- and Bono, in particular -- left the PopMart tour's space age goggles and inane costumes on the bus. And as hopelessly antiquated as it may sound in the year 2000, it's as if they decided it was time to write and record an album of very good, extremely substantial traditional rock songs with an underlying inspirational bent. ''Pop'' had its substantial moments too, but the band came across far from confident blending electronic swooshes into their songs, and the music seemed to slip through their fingers (and ours). Starting with ''Beautiful Day,'' which opens ''All That You Can't Leave Behind,'' the new album is as unwaveringly assured as ''Pop'' was tentative. ''Wild Honey,'' all sexual charge and emotional ambivalence, finds a melodic groove and stays there; the equally lusty ''Elevation'' and ''Walk On'' (one of many songs with lyrics straight out of a self help manual) have the charging horse feel of U2's youth, with a bumpy noise upgrade courtesy of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Not to denigrate their early '90s one two punch, ''Achtung Baby'' and ''Zooropa,'' on which the band let its freak flag fly to often lustrous effect, but the new work focuses on songs, not sonic gimmicks, and the difference is palpable. Even when they frill up a track with rootsy touches, like the R&B accents of the ''lift yourself up'' bromide ''Stuck in a Moment,'' they shake off their stodginess. New generation dullards like the Wallflowers would do well to scribble notes. Of course, a U2 album would not be a U2 album without assorted Bono upheavals and quests. Here, the 40 year old addresses a midlife crisis (complete with apparent affair) in ''New York'' and longs for ''heaven on earth/ we need it now'' in ''Peace on Earth.'' The songs are heavyhearted, but the arrangements -- the grimy urban beats of the former and the delicate balladry of the latter -- aren't. (On ''New York," you even forgive Bono for describing Manhattan as hot and multiethnic, which is about as original as calling Dublin ''drizzly.'') Even the Edge dusts off his needles and pins leads. U2 no longer seem wary of their tendency toward the anthemic and grandiose, and they shouldn’t be; it still sets them apart from nearly everyone, with the exception of Radiohead at their loftiest. Unless it's on behalf of hard to recite album titles, ''All That You Can't Leave Behind'' doesn't stake any claims for advancing the art of pop music. At this point, U2 wouldn't be the ones to take us there anyway. But at a time when rock feels so earthbound, and dance steeped albums like Moby's ''Play'' provide the musical exaltation guitar bands once did, U2 simply want to reclaim some of that old stomping ground. In their hands, falling back on old habits isn't cowardice, but a virtue. |
