Pop
Reviews :
Exclusive Review from Rolling Stone
The conventional, major-label A&R wisdom on electronica
boils down to this: "If only we could find a rock band that
plays dance music and can write real songs." U2 did just
that on "Pop" -- and nobody cared. Maybe they overhyped
the techno angle; "Pop" is far more economical in its
art-pop disturbance than "Achtung Baby" and less
flamboyant in its
ache than "The Joshua Tree." There are loops aplenty,
but Pop is about hearts beating, not just pulse beats, and the
best
mix of sob and throb is in the ballads, a U2 specialty: the grim
burbling of "Gone," Bono's arcing anguish in
"Please."
Taken on its own -- away from the chart numbers and the big
shtick of PopMart -- "Pop" is simply an album of great
pop. For some reason, for a lot of folks, that's just not enough.
Then there's the Bowie Problem. With the metal-machine-music
overload of 1995's "Outside" and
"Earthling"'s lip-service
approach to drum-and-bass, Bowie has been making too big a deal
of staying even with the pop fashion curve. The result:
He ends up selling his new material short. The way Bowie lit into
"Earthling" numbers like "Looking for
Satellites" and
"Seven Years in Tibet" on his recent, career-overview
club tour proved that he's much better off when he stops worrying
about eclipsing his past and spends more time enjoying it -- like
we do.
Rolling Stone Network.
Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music Report
Pop is a mighty big word for its three little letters, and Pop
the album covers all the bases: U2's new music encompasses
every interpretation of the word you could offer, from the album
itself, which is a bold and brilliantly ironic artistic
statement for the '90s, to the band being a bunch of aging
alterna-arena-rockers dabbling in irony and camp because
they heard that's the popular thing these days. Having ushered us
inside the velvet ropes of the single, "Discothèque," Pop
finds the Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen, Jr., and the Fly
mingling with royalty and rough trade under a swirling disco
ball. Much of the album's imagery and style suggest the
playgrounds of the rich and decadent, the intrigues of the super
-rich (sample song titles: "Miami," "The Playboy
Mansion," "If You Wear That Velvet Dress").
Frankly, there's not nearly
as much drum'n'bass or "club" influence as we'd been
expecting from all the rumors floating around the last few
months.
That said, some of the album does come off as gesture rather than
actual substance, reflecting a world where a flamboyant
entrance or a memorable catch-prase carries more weight than
actual meaning or communication. The exceptions to this
sweeping statement are, of course, the ballads, peaceful,
massive, stadium-rousing anthems such as "If God Will Send
His
Angels," "Gone," and especially "The Playboy
Mansion," where Bono and the group eschew the glitz and tell
us what they
really think of it all. Stay tuned for the band to undertake one
of the most ambitious tours ever (and one of the biggest
traveling video screens, we're told) this summer.
JAMES LIEN
College Media, Inc.
Exclusive Review from MTV
If one's to believe all the ink about electronic music as the
next big thing, then dance music is the new rock and roll. Pop
embellishes U2's musical aesthetic with samples, percussive
loops, distortions and compressions -- yet those elements
never overwhelm the band's own personality. Think about it: this
band has always played with a similar hip-shakin',
bottom-heavy execution through Larry Mullen Jr.'s incessant
drumming, Adam Clayton's rib-jangling basslines, and the
Edge's minimal axe-picking.
And it works like gangbusters, and places Bono on fertile
ground to explore his favorite quandaries: the loss of faith in a
world without God ("If God Will Send His Angels,''
"Wake Up Dead Man''), disillusionment with a world of
surfaces
("Last Night on Earth,'' "Gone''), and love in a time
when "you take what you can get, 'cause it's all that you
can find.''
Pop isn't exactly U2-goes-techno, but it's a rock
record that would sound great on a dance floor. In a pop
landscape
which continually fragments itself, I guess that's enough to
count as significant.
Smith Galtney
MTV Networks.
Quick Quotes :
Ranked #31 in the Village Voice's 1997 Pazz & Jop Critics'
Poll.
Village Voice 2/24/98
Included in Q Magazine's "50 Best Albums of 1997."
Q Magazine 1/98, p.115
4 Stars (out of 5) - "...a record whose rhythms, textures
and visceral guitar mayhem make for a thrilling roller-coaster
ride,
one whose sheer inventiveness is plainly bolstered by the heavy
involvement of techno/trip-hop wizard Howie B..."
Rolling Stone 3/20/97, pp.81-83
9 (out of 10) - "...No, U2 haven't crafted a garden of
hooks....Rather, they've turned a slightly cold eye to an
uncertain,
end-of-the-century moment, when dueling genres often can't
pronounce each other's names, everyone dances to techno-
inspired stuff by night, and no one remembers what constitutes a
pop hit..."
Spin 4/97, p.153
"...Despite its glittery launch, the album is neither
trashy nor kitschy, nor is it junky-fun dance music. It
incorporates bits of
the new technology--a high-pitched siren squeal here, a
sound-collage splatter there--but it is still very much a U2
album..."
Entertainment Weekly 3/7/97, pp.62-64
Notes :
Additional personnel: Steve Osborne, Howie B., Flood, Marius De Vries (keyboards); Ben Hillier (programming).
Engineers: Mark "Spike" Stent, Howie B., Alan Moulder.
Recorded at South Beach Studios, Miami, Florida; Hanover,
Windmill Lane Recording Studios and The Works,
Dublin, Ireland.
POP was nominated for a 1998 Grammy for Best Rock Album.
Like much pop music in the mid-1990s, POP is cobbled together
out of buzzy synthesizers and reverberant keyboards,
techno drum loops and funky live drums, guitars distorted into
clouds of metal, vocals you sometimes have to work to hear,
and songs that seek God and sex and other important stuff in the
world's trash heaps. And it's obsessed, more than anything
else, with pop itself. At its most frisky, as on the dance-club
single "Discotheque," POP sounds like Oasis backed by
the
Chemical Brothers (see that combo's recent single "Setting
Sun" for comparison). Drop the club beat and add a bright
acoustic guitar, as on "Staring At The Sun," and POP
sounds like, well, Oasis.
This is the kind of future-pop U2 introduced on its watershed
1991 album ACHTUNG, BABY, and POP completes a sort
of trilogy. Whereas 1993's ZOOROPA played up the "art"
side of this experiment, POP, which finds art-rock influence
Brian
Eno gone from the producer's seat and techno wiz kid Howie B.
taking up some of his space, plays up the pop side. It's the
most playful album U2 has ever made, with grooves made for
dancing, not thinking, and melodies that explode in your face
like
bubblegum. Lyrically, U2 is still looking for what it hasn't
found, in such places as nouveau-riche "Miami" and the
celebrity
trash receptacle that is "The Playboy Mansion."
Musically, though, U2 seems to have found it, in the simple,
ecstatic click of
a dance beat.