Review: U2's "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb"
This One Is No Bomb
ARTIST: U2
ALBUM: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
RATING: A
Rock and roll is normally a demonic art. As such, you don't expect 40-somethings who have already sold tens of millions of records and have more money than God (even after God gets his next round of Bush tax cuts) to fall from their creative peak for more than a decade only to regain form. It doesn't happen. The Rolling Stones tanked after firing Mick Taylor and falling victim to a desire to meld with the times rather than have the times meld to them. Pink Floyd parted with Roger Waters and their music became (pun intended) watered-down. Zeppelin were never the same after Plant's car crash during the Presence sessions allowed Jimmy Page to indulge a bit too much in his hard drug habit. None of these bands ever recovered (and in Zeppelin's case, John Bonham's death closed the deal on that ever happening) - but fear not. Despite the relentless annoyance of that the recent iPod commercial featuring "Vertigo", U2 have somehow done the impossible more than 11 years after the release of their worst album and slid back into the sound of their prime. While their latest, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb doesn't break any new sonic ground for the Irish quartet, their mastery of their craft and the ease of their command of still herculean talents have them breaking ground in a totally new way. Could it be that U2 are in the midst of an unprecedented second creative peak in their already Hall-Of-Fame career?
In 1991, when Bono and Co. broke out of a four-year recording hiatus to release the uber-brilliant Achtung Baby, that album's chaotic and "industrial" sound was instrumental in ringing in an era where virtually all rock-based music had some sort of label, often with a hyphen involved somewhere: Grunge; alt-rock; alt-metal; alt-punk; nu-metal; rap-rock; you get the idea. You couldn't just have one countdown show on MTV anymore - there had to be one for each genre. Eventually, frustrated programming execs grew frustrated [read: revelled in] the end of the rock star and stopped airing music videos at all on MTV. While helping rock become increasingly fragmented, Achtung and its genre-bending experimentation would go on to inspire another generation of rock bands (usually put under some "alt-" label) like Radiohead, Oasis, Coldplay and Wilco to varying degrees, whether or not they're honest enough to admit it, and the byproduct of this new trend of experimentation was that the music was often too frightening to the mass market to, say, carry the genre above the undertow of its subgenres.
If anything, Achtung Baby was too good.
This is not to blame U2 for rock's increasing irrelevance throughout the ass end of the 1990s. All told, if Cobain had any real friends (a better rehab program and fewer shotguns), or if Pearl Jam hadn't decided to practically take 3 crucial years off from touring because of a battle with Ticketmaster, things could just as easily have turned out differenly from the reality we eventually had of Boy Bands ruling the end of the decade. But alas, that's where we went. And while Pearl Jam's martyrdom didn't adversely effect their music, U2's Stones-esque elephantitis saw their music suffer to the point that they were nearly irrelevant. By the time 1993's Zooropa came around, it was becoming clear that the band was starting to go overboard on the whole irony thing, preferring to write songs that would be little more than props in an elaborate, themed stage show. And aside from the oft-forgotten gem "Stay, Faraway (So Close)", Zooropa was an absolute steaming dung pile of a record, and 1997's Pop wasn't much better. Where the band had built its name and following upon enormous anthems like "Bad" and "With or Without You" that were delivered with unparalelled emotion by a singer with golden pipes, self-indulgent mumbling and pseudo-rapping took precedent for Bono, while the rest of the band developed an unhealthy reliance on drum machines and synthesizers, the latter of which often crowded out the brilliance of guitarist The Edge, whose performance on Achtung Baby was so pivotal in the album's success.
Pop (1997) was definitely not U2's strongest moment.
All of this made it all the more exciting when in 2000, the band finally released a decent album in the life-affirming All That You Can't Leave Behind, which was actually quite good, at least through the first 7 tracks. It was refreshing to know that U2 could still care about writing great songs again, but it was still easy to worry that it was their last gasp, and that the band's regained success would again make them arrogant and lazy, leading them to release more recorded fecal matter. The other four tracks on that album weren't offensively bad, but certainl not very good or interesting, and one still had the feeling that even on the good tracks the band wasn't trying particularly hard, at least not the way they did back in the Unforgettable Fire or Joshua Tree days.
Thankfully, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb returns U2 to the precious balances that once made them the world's greatest band: the balance between the subjects of love and politics; the balance between overproduction and underproduction; the balance between whispering and shouting; and the balance between taking themselves too seriously and not taking themselves seriously at all.
There is no mistake throughout most of the album's 47 minutes - this is primarily a rock record. But its genius is that it mines many of U2's personalities from the past: there is the garage-rock brashness of the opening track, "Vertigo", and "All Because Of You"; the earnest, teach-the-world-to-sing global awareness of "Yahweh" and "Crumbs From Your Table"; ascending anthems in "Miracle Drug" and "Original Of the Species"; and "Man and a Woman" and "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own", which feature Bono-as-love-struck-lothario.
But what makes Atomic Bomb such a striking return to form is the combination of two factors, the first and probably most important of which is the fact that Bono sings on this album like he's in his 20s rather than his 40s. "The stars are in your eyes" Bono wails on "Miracle Drug", the album's second track, "I see them when you smile". Meanwhile, the Edge hammers away at his signature distorted stecatto riffs that often sound like sirens or bells, which happens to be the second crucial factor of the band's return to form - the Edge has his god damned guitars back. Finally. Electric and acoustic both, he's not afraid to use them with punishing virtuousity.
With those factors in place, Bono could be singing about dirt on his Porsche and it would kick ass. And as was the case with All That You Can't Leave Behind, Atomic Bomb doesn't completely abandon the electronica of the band's 90s experimentation - it merely utilizes those elements as garnish in the way they invented during Achtung Baby. This may not be quite as "challenging" to the band in terms of musicianship or "breaking new ground", but they seem to have poured some of that excess energy back into writing the best songs that they possibly can, which in my book is the preferrable dispersion of the band's resources.
One can only wonder what would have been if U2 hadn't decided to experiment most of the 90s away to virtually no avail, instead spending time trying to craft rock songs like "All Because of You" that would make any current "garage" band like The Strokes age jealous in its ferocity or the catchiness of its hook. While it's frustrating to think of what U2 had in the early 90s only to throw it away, it's heartening to know that they may finally have found what they're looking for.
I read recently that Bono said he wanted to avoid having U2 "become crap like everyone else does". They're off to a good start. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is easily the best album I've heard this year, and the U2's best since Achtung Baby.
Long live rock and roll.
============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================
ARTIST: U2
ALBUM: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
RATING: A
Rock and roll is normally a demonic art. As such, you don't expect 40-somethings who have already sold tens of millions of records and have more money than God (even after God gets his next round of Bush tax cuts) to fall from their creative peak for more than a decade only to regain form. It doesn't happen. The Rolling Stones tanked after firing Mick Taylor and falling victim to a desire to meld with the times rather than have the times meld to them. Pink Floyd parted with Roger Waters and their music became (pun intended) watered-down. Zeppelin were never the same after Plant's car crash during the Presence sessions allowed Jimmy Page to indulge a bit too much in his hard drug habit. None of these bands ever recovered (and in Zeppelin's case, John Bonham's death closed the deal on that ever happening) - but fear not. Despite the relentless annoyance of that the recent iPod commercial featuring "Vertigo", U2 have somehow done the impossible more than 11 years after the release of their worst album and slid back into the sound of their prime. While their latest, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb doesn't break any new sonic ground for the Irish quartet, their mastery of their craft and the ease of their command of still herculean talents have them breaking ground in a totally new way. Could it be that U2 are in the midst of an unprecedented second creative peak in their already Hall-Of-Fame career?
In 1991, when Bono and Co. broke out of a four-year recording hiatus to release the uber-brilliant Achtung Baby, that album's chaotic and "industrial" sound was instrumental in ringing in an era where virtually all rock-based music had some sort of label, often with a hyphen involved somewhere: Grunge; alt-rock; alt-metal; alt-punk; nu-metal; rap-rock; you get the idea. You couldn't just have one countdown show on MTV anymore - there had to be one for each genre. Eventually, frustrated programming execs grew frustrated [read: revelled in] the end of the rock star and stopped airing music videos at all on MTV. While helping rock become increasingly fragmented, Achtung and its genre-bending experimentation would go on to inspire another generation of rock bands (usually put under some "alt-" label) like Radiohead, Oasis, Coldplay and Wilco to varying degrees, whether or not they're honest enough to admit it, and the byproduct of this new trend of experimentation was that the music was often too frightening to the mass market to, say, carry the genre above the undertow of its subgenres.
If anything, Achtung Baby was too good.
This is not to blame U2 for rock's increasing irrelevance throughout the ass end of the 1990s. All told, if Cobain had any real friends (a better rehab program and fewer shotguns), or if Pearl Jam hadn't decided to practically take 3 crucial years off from touring because of a battle with Ticketmaster, things could just as easily have turned out differenly from the reality we eventually had of Boy Bands ruling the end of the decade. But alas, that's where we went. And while Pearl Jam's martyrdom didn't adversely effect their music, U2's Stones-esque elephantitis saw their music suffer to the point that they were nearly irrelevant. By the time 1993's Zooropa came around, it was becoming clear that the band was starting to go overboard on the whole irony thing, preferring to write songs that would be little more than props in an elaborate, themed stage show. And aside from the oft-forgotten gem "Stay, Faraway (So Close)", Zooropa was an absolute steaming dung pile of a record, and 1997's Pop wasn't much better. Where the band had built its name and following upon enormous anthems like "Bad" and "With or Without You" that were delivered with unparalelled emotion by a singer with golden pipes, self-indulgent mumbling and pseudo-rapping took precedent for Bono, while the rest of the band developed an unhealthy reliance on drum machines and synthesizers, the latter of which often crowded out the brilliance of guitarist The Edge, whose performance on Achtung Baby was so pivotal in the album's success.
Pop (1997) was definitely not U2's strongest moment.
All of this made it all the more exciting when in 2000, the band finally released a decent album in the life-affirming All That You Can't Leave Behind, which was actually quite good, at least through the first 7 tracks. It was refreshing to know that U2 could still care about writing great songs again, but it was still easy to worry that it was their last gasp, and that the band's regained success would again make them arrogant and lazy, leading them to release more recorded fecal matter. The other four tracks on that album weren't offensively bad, but certainl not very good or interesting, and one still had the feeling that even on the good tracks the band wasn't trying particularly hard, at least not the way they did back in the Unforgettable Fire or Joshua Tree days.
Thankfully, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb returns U2 to the precious balances that once made them the world's greatest band: the balance between the subjects of love and politics; the balance between overproduction and underproduction; the balance between whispering and shouting; and the balance between taking themselves too seriously and not taking themselves seriously at all.
There is no mistake throughout most of the album's 47 minutes - this is primarily a rock record. But its genius is that it mines many of U2's personalities from the past: there is the garage-rock brashness of the opening track, "Vertigo", and "All Because Of You"; the earnest, teach-the-world-to-sing global awareness of "Yahweh" and "Crumbs From Your Table"; ascending anthems in "Miracle Drug" and "Original Of the Species"; and "Man and a Woman" and "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own", which feature Bono-as-love-struck-lothario.
But what makes Atomic Bomb such a striking return to form is the combination of two factors, the first and probably most important of which is the fact that Bono sings on this album like he's in his 20s rather than his 40s. "The stars are in your eyes" Bono wails on "Miracle Drug", the album's second track, "I see them when you smile". Meanwhile, the Edge hammers away at his signature distorted stecatto riffs that often sound like sirens or bells, which happens to be the second crucial factor of the band's return to form - the Edge has his god damned guitars back. Finally. Electric and acoustic both, he's not afraid to use them with punishing virtuousity.
With those factors in place, Bono could be singing about dirt on his Porsche and it would kick ass. And as was the case with All That You Can't Leave Behind, Atomic Bomb doesn't completely abandon the electronica of the band's 90s experimentation - it merely utilizes those elements as garnish in the way they invented during Achtung Baby. This may not be quite as "challenging" to the band in terms of musicianship or "breaking new ground", but they seem to have poured some of that excess energy back into writing the best songs that they possibly can, which in my book is the preferrable dispersion of the band's resources.
One can only wonder what would have been if U2 hadn't decided to experiment most of the 90s away to virtually no avail, instead spending time trying to craft rock songs like "All Because of You" that would make any current "garage" band like The Strokes age jealous in its ferocity or the catchiness of its hook. While it's frustrating to think of what U2 had in the early 90s only to throw it away, it's heartening to know that they may finally have found what they're looking for.
I read recently that Bono said he wanted to avoid having U2 "become crap like everyone else does". They're off to a good start. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is easily the best album I've heard this year, and the U2's best since Achtung Baby.
Long live rock and roll.
============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home