Trademark flourishes as U2 tick all the right boxes

Irish Examiner, February 14, 2009

SPEAKING to the press in late 2007, Bono hinted U2’s next album might well be the most experimental of their career.

The recording sessions had, he revealed, yielded a "a lot of hardcore trance", whilst The Edge’s guitar playing was, said the singer, verging on heavy metal.

Thankfully, the spectre of a U2 LP in the style of the Prodigy hasn’t come to pass. If anything, No Line On The Horizon is the most conventional collection they have put together since the 1980s. Having sloughed off their earnest image on 1991’s Acthung Baby!, only to anxiously re-embrace it a decade later on All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the band has spent much of their recent history in a state of nervous flux — a period from which they have finally emerged with a record that adroitly brings together the best bits from their various incarnations.

Recorded in Dublin, London and Morocco with assistance from the group’s three longtime collaborators, Brian Eno, Steve Lillywhite and Daniel Lanois, No Line On The Horizon packs all of U2’s trademark flourishes onto a single disc.

There’s a nod towards their pedal to the floor Vertigo period on the single Get On Your Boots — a molten rocker that rides a thumping treated riff, over which Bono delivers his finest angst-ridden shriek. It’s a sensibility that is repeated on the title track — one guesses this was the song Bono was referring to when he claimed The Edge had ‘gone hardcore’. Here, a beefy slab of reverb doffs a hat to the ‘desert metal’ of outfits such as Queens of the Stone Age, whilst also referencing psychedelic rock and even cribbing a few tricks from The Killers (quite a reversal considering how much the Las Vegas band have taken from U2).

But elsewhere the tone is markedly more retrospective as U2 dip into their full arsenal of tricks and tics. This is probably a reflection of No Line On The Horizon’s convoluted recording process. Coming off their last world tour in early 2006, the band had promised to put out a new album within 12 months. Initially, they hooked up with Rick Rubin, the career reviving ‘song doctor’ whose intervention has helped rehabilitate artists as diverse as Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and, most recently, Metallica.

Yet things didn’t quite gel. Rather than seeking to re-imagine their sound, the group decided to revert to first principles and sought out the three producers who had served as midwives to their landmark 80s album: Eno, Lillywhite and Lanois. One thing they did change, however, was the scenery — in mid-2008, the foursome rented a compound in the city of Fez in Morocco, where they spent several months hammering out ideas with Eno.

No Line On The Horizon is mercifully free of clunky world-music influences. That’s not to say some of the setting hasn’t seeped into the playing. Indeed, the album’s most interesting diversions, the experimental Unknown Caller and Fez — Being Born will come as a endearing surprise to anyone who believed U2 have long ago ceased to be innovators.

On Unknown Caller, Eno’s influence is immediately apparent: it opens with a loop of Arabic rhythms and a sampled bird tweet before morphing into a widescreen torch song. Even more intriguing is Fez, which may well be U2’s most left-field venture since the overtly experimental 1993 album Zooropa. Sounding, in the best sense, like a Radiohead B-side, it begins with a swirl of disembodied voices, churning static and ebbing beats, which eventually give way to a fantastic Edge solo and swirling prayer chants. For these moments alone, No Line On The Horizon deserves to be fast-tracked into the U2 hall of fame.

Still, too much weird stuff would risk alienating U2’s core constituency — the earnest rock fans of middle America. With that audience in mind, Magnificent delivers a stadium-sized Edge solo and Moment of Surrender contains lashings of free-form emoting from Bono — it’s one of the few moments where the singer sounds as if he’s the only one in the driving seat. You can imagine him fetching up in the studio fresh from lunch with Tony Blair, determined to heal humanity through the holy power of music — in other words, it’s the sort of blue-chip sanctimoniousness which the world expects — and fans demand — of U2.

The tone turns increasingly soulful over the closing straits. Written for Jim Sheridan’s Afghanistan war movie Brothers, the stripped down White As Snow could, for instance, be an updating of Rattle and Hum. Singing in a sparse croon, Bono is devoid of ego while countrified rhythm playing from Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr gives the track the air of a campfire ballad. From the ghost of Robert Johnson to the spirit of The Beatles, Breathe — which Brian Eno has declared to be U2’s best ever — is a psychedelic epic, with a kitchen sink load of orchestration and enough mellow emoting to have Chris Martin breaking out in an envious rash. It’s not quite what you expect of U2 — but it’s interesting to see them have a stab at contemporary arena rock’s vogue for heartfelt balladry.

It closes with arguably its strongest three minutes, Cedars Of Lebanon — a whispered lament which finds Bono emoting in an exhausted croak. Parsing the lyrics, he seems to be addressing the Middle East conflict. But there’s no pat sermonising.

With an understatedness that he might do wise to incorporate into his public persona, the singer whispers his way through an ennui-soaked ballad while guitars shift tentatively in the background. Recalling the less over-the-top moments of The Joshua Tree, it’s a reminder U2 have always made the most sense when they jettison the bombast and sing from the heart.

No Line On The Horizon is released on March 2.

© Irish Examiner, 2009.

SalU2, Nelson.