All that you can't leave behind
It really is a "Beautiful Day" for U2 fans now that the band has absolved itself of its spotty ‘90s output with their latest release All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Let's be brutally honest: 1997's Pop was, with few exceptions, rubbish. Its poor sales showed that U2 could try their fans’ patience with arty pretensions - especially after getting hoodwinked by '93's sorely uneven Zooropa. Nine years ago this fall the band gave us their brilliant Achtung Baby, and U2 - Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton, the Edge, and Bono - exceed that feat here by giving us one of the most consistently exhilarating records of the band’s 20-year career."I know I'm not a helpless case," Bono beckons on the album's lead single, the explosively catchy "Beautiful Day." An urgent celebration of the Dublin quartet's rekindled flame, The Edge's infamous, ringing "Flying V" guitar - absent since the mid-‘80s - is the most immediately striking element of the song, although the melody and oscillating beat cannot be discounted.
The disco ball that dominated the band's last decade still glitters over the uplifting "Elevation," a song that percolates funk as much as it rocks via The Edge's relentless riffs. Still, Bono owns the song's hook with his caterwauling "hoo-ooo"s, propelling the tune. Gorgeous ballads are plentiful on All That You Can't Leave Behind as evidenced by "Walk On," a prom classic to be, and "Grace," the closer. The former is an optimistic waltz that has Bono giving his most heartfelt performance since Achtung's "One." On the latter - a mellotron-led, bass-popping ode - he sings of the pained subject, "Grace, it's the name of a girl, it's also a thought that changed the world."
The group revisits American R&B basics on the engaging "In a Little While," managing to evoke a sound last heard on 1988’s Rattle & Hum. Equally soulful is "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of It," a blissful, mid-tempo rocker that has Bono sounding like a Pop naysayer, confessing that "I'm just trying to find a decent melody/A song that I can sing in my own company."On the very next number, "Peace on Earth" - the album's focal point - the man born Paul Hewson does just that. Perhaps finally tired of the "used car salesman of rock" persona he concocted as "The Fly" and "Mephisto," Bono restores a little faith when he confesses, "Where I grew up there weren't many trees/Where there were, we'd tear them down and use them on our enemies.
Later in the song, as his collaborators crescendo beneath him, he asks, "Jesus, can you take the time/To throw a drowning man a line?" Also speaking of "The ones who hear no sound/Whose sons are buried in the ground," one can't help but feel moved by the social commentary and pleased by the notion that the days of giant martini olives and 40-foot lemons as stage props appear to be indeed behind us.U2 has always been an "all or nothing" band. From 1980 to 1991 they gave their all, scoring the band millions of disciples. With nothing to sustain us on the last few albums, interest understandably waned. Playing again as if the songs here actually mean something, the group has regained the spirit of its past like we all hoped they would. All That You Can't Leave Behind is the U2 we’ve all been longing for.
-- John Luerssen --
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 reining 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 through 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 that 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?
(RS 853)
JAMES HUNTER
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