Zooropa

Zooropa

Reviews :

Exclusive Review from Rolling Stone

Following up their earthshaking "Achtung Baby," "Zooropa" further embellishes the new model U2. These are the superstars, after all, who audaciously reinvented themselves on their ninth album exchanging chiming guitar for funkier riffing and dense, hip-hop-meets-industrial production, unrestrained wailing for insinuating talk-singing, fever for a bubbling heat. "Zooropa," their 10th outing, emphasizes the shift: Instead of the mythic, desert-landscape cover shot of "The Joshua Tree" (1987), there's deconstructed video imagery; for the desperate spiritual questing of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," they substitute the monochromatic dead-end musings of "Numb." They've found what they weren't looking for and are trying to learn how to live with it.

More influenced than ever by co-producer-conceptualist Brian Eno, the de facto fifth member whom U2 first employed on "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), their music now parallels his in its pursuit of ambience. But in contrast to the gentle detachment of Eno's worldview (a kind of determined naivete or a brainy guy's wish for instinct), theirs now is one of an alert wariness, suspicion, threat.

"Lemon," "Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car," "Dirty Day" this is smart, compelling, daring music that is also very demanding. With "The Wanderer" and its unsurpassable guest vocal by Johnny Cash, they step back and let a voice that transcends contemporary bleakness intone. It's the man in black speaking in the tough moral voice of an Old Testament prophet. Cash sounds more human than anything else in the post-apocalyptic zone of Zooropa, an echo chilling in its intimations of irretrievable loss. (RS 672/73)

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music

U2's teenage fans who love those sing-a-long, lighter-hoisting songs of theirs ("Sunday Bloody Sunday," "One") will be stunned at first, second and third listen to Zooropa, a dark-hearted, ironically danceable transformation featuring U2's alter-ego. Although the album is coproduced by The Edge (with Brian Eno and Flood), his guitars take a back seat to Eno's mercurial keyboards and Flood's input of drum loops and noisy samples. Even when the guitars do sound off, they're heavily tampered with (like all the instruments here), such treatment suggesting The Edge is looking beyond the rattle-and-strum sound that made him famous. Unlike Achtung Baby, Zooropa (knocked out in three quick months) has little room for pop kitsch or superstar pretense, with the mighty Bono going so far as to concede lead vocals to The Edge on the album's first single "Numb," and to Johnny Cash (!) on the album closer "The Wanderer." Sure, U2 could probably make another Joshua Tree with its eyes closed, but atypical, unhyped steps forward like Zooropa indicate this band's deeper genius and its commitment to debunking its mammoth star image.

Steve Ciabattoni

Exclusive Review from CMJ New Music Report

Not since the days of David Bowie running amok in Berlin (or even the escapades of one John Ono Lennon, ex-M.B.E.) has a rock star or group been So Huge and done utterly whatever the hell they wanted to do artistically, creatively and financially. On the one hand, Zooropa is as much a media constellation (tour, video melange, hype circus, Bono's gold-lame suit) as it is another record. But it's also fascinating musically, with shadows and echoes of other Eno-influenced rock milestones like David Bowie's Low, Talking Heads' Fear Of Music, or Roxy Music's first LP looming tall over Zooropa's contours. Expecting lots of easy, vacuous, rousing anthems for the band to play in all those humongous soccer stadiums? Not quite: More than just a stopgap album to prop up a tour, it's yet another bona-fide breakthrough. And what a brave new world we live in, as Zooropa unveils a whole new planetscape of treated sound-except for one guitar on "Stay (Faraway, So Close)" there's virtually nothing here distinguishable as a conventionally amplified instrument, as things are distorted, twisted, reverbed and sonically disfigured beyond recognition. Zoo keepers: "Babyface" (the most Bowie-esque of the lot), "Lemon," "Some Days Are Better Than Others" and Johnny Cash's guest vocal on "The Wanderer."

James Lien

Quick Quotes :

Ranked #9 in the Village Voice's 1993 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll.
Village Voice 3/1/94, p.5

Included in Q's list of `The 50 Best Albums Of 1993' - "...U2's most adventurous outing yet...."
Q Magazine 1/94, p.86

Ranked #1 in Entertainment Weekly's list of `The Best & Worst Records Of 1993' - "...[U2's] attempt to make sense of their place in pop and the world at large is downright heroic...."
Entertainment Weekly 12/31/93, p.115

4 Stars - Excellent - "...startling....a daring, imaginative coda to ACHTUNG BABY....it works brilliantly..."
Rolling Stone 8/5/93, p.63

Highly Recommended - "...U2 is bidding to up the ante on its new freedom....ZOOROPA indicates U2 might be worthy of whatever absurd mutations the '90s throw our way..."
Spin 9/93, p.116

"...by no means a stopgap project, ZOOROPA ranks among the band's best work to date..."
Musician 9/93, p.76

4 Stars - Excellent - "...here is U2, the foremost rock 'n' roll band on the planet, seeing if rock can be fashioned from sonic technology....ZOOROPA refines the first steps in this attempt that ACHTUNG BABY took....the results transcend the merely experimental..."
Q Magazine 8/93, p.99

4 Stars - Excellent - "...It's stronger than its parent ACHTUNG BABY..."
Q Magazine 8/94, p.115

"...after a decade of intermittently looking and sounding crap they've got both the image and the music right...."
Melody Maker 7/3/93, p.28

6 - Good.
New Musical Express 7/3/93, p.32

"...a harried, spontaneous-sounding, and ultimately exhilarating album on which the world's greatest arena guitar band rarely sounds like itself...For an album that wasn't meant to be an album, it's quite an album..." - Rating: A
Entertainment Weekly 7/9/93, p.46

Notes :

Additional personnel: Johnny Cash (vocals); Brian Eno (keyboards, synthesizer); Des Broadbery, Flood (programming).

Additional engineers: Robbie Adams, Daniel Lanois, Flood.

Recorded at The Factory, Windmill Lane Studios and Westland Studios, Dublin, Ireland in spring 1993.

All songs written by members of U2. Contains samples from "Fanfare" (from the album LENIN'S FAVORITE SONGS) and "The City Sleeps" (as performed by MC 900 Ft. Jesus).

ZOOROPA won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

If you study the wild computer graphics on the sleeve you could be expecting something frantic and electric. In fact, this is the most relaxing U2 album to date, and one on which they sound content to cruise instead of sermonizing. Brian Eno's prescence no doubt added the ambient feel that is present on most of the tracks. Bono even manages to sound like Roland Gift (Fine Young Cannibals) on 'Lemon' and a monosyllabic Lou Reed on 'Numb'. U2 took risks with this album because it broke a familiar pattern by not sounding like a U2 record. They sailed through the audition.

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