“20” – U2 TRACKS POLL (voting closes midday, Thursday 4 August)

dan. try that again
http://achtungbaby.u2.com/images/top_image.jpg

i like the sound of this new doc/ DVD.

That looks like a Sears catalogue from 1981.

Without the bra section, surely.

It looks like a disassembled Transformer.

I hate that all these acts keep releasing awesome looking boxed sets years after I've more or less sworn off paying for expensive, awesome looking boxed sets. I'm looking at you, too, Smiths Pink Floyd, etc.

I do want these Achtung Baby extras -- but I bought the CD singles as they came out, and I have the LP on the original vinyl, still pretty pristine. It is funny that those things are now 'de luxe'.

The dvd would mean most to me because my really fantastic Achtung Baby video cassette won't seem to play on my video player.

not sure I can justify this one at all:
http://www.rhino.co.uk/store/products,the-smiths-complete-deluxe-collectors-boxset_39767.htm

again, some of us had the vinyl first time round!

pf i have it in my head that just about everything you possess is an antique, I can quite easily imagine a mahogany ipad

It looks like a disassembled Transformer.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, August 5, 2011 4:36 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

LOL!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cSIJd5KIL._SL500_AA300_.jpg http://www.u2rockband.com/postcards/images/bono/bono_makeup.jpg

I just had another thought re: U2 and Irishness and the USA.

Major detour here, but humor me:

I know "Oh, I just LOVE his accent, it's so SEXY" has been around since the dawn of time. And that it applies for nearly every discernible variant of world Englishes.
However.

There is a certain kind of American woman -- you may know the type or maybe not -- of a certain age, usually, who will just flip the fuck out for any old run of the mill dude with an Irish accent. I blame U2 for that. Colin Farrell, for instance, has benefited substantially from this.

Example: My old roommate, who was not a good judge of character by anyone's measure, once fell for this Irish guy who worked as a bartender in the college town where we lived. He was kind of coarse, nasty, and stupid - not someone I would want to socialize with much less date. Months she dated this guy, he came over, was a complete tool, and mostly just mooched off of us. Later, she found out that he was smoking crack while she was sleeping. THEN she found out that he *wasn't even Irish* and that he had been faking the accent. That's when she broke it off.

i don't think u2 has all that much to do with american chicks going nuts for any accent from the british isles

Another example: Lisa Simpson's Irish boyfriend!
Colin: I'm Colin.
Lisa Simpson: I haven't seen you at school
Colin: Just moved from Ireland. My dad's a musician.
Lisa Simpson: Is he...?
Colin: He's not Bono.
Lisa Simpson: I just thought because you're Irish and you care about...
Colin: He's NOT Bono.

(please note - i don't really "blame" U2 for this, nor do i think they or actual irish people have/had anything to do with my ex-roomie's super degenerate ex-boyfriend)

have been listening to ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND again
and to be honest I've been underwhelmed
though I still think a couple of good tracks turn up late on.

ATOMIC BOMB probably the reverse
it has at least 3 good ones in the first half (miracle drug, sometimes, blinding lights)
but the second half might be the worst half U2 have ever done, save 'a man and a woman'
I don't like how they strain for big choruses that just don't come off -
'original of the species'
and 'all because of you', so mystifyingly a 45.

we still haven't addressed NO LINE ON THE HORIZON
I wonder if I actually like that more?

'Hallelujah here she comes' underwhelmed me in 1989
maybe more to my taste now
though Desire Hollywood Remix is surely better!!

we still haven't addressed NO LINE ON THE HORIZON
I wonder if I actually like that more?

― the pinefox, Saturday, August 6, 2011 4:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i voted for "breathe"

There's good stuff on all the later albums, but they haven't really bedded down as a whole for me. Pop's the last one that feels like a project, rather than a bunch of songs (nothing wrong with that, but it's hard to get a handle on in the context of doing this).

I've finished the counting, incidentally. There's only one tie in the top fifty, so I'll probably go for that. There's also some stuff at 51-60 which I'd like to include, but you've got to draw a line somewhere.

Yeah "Breathe" is very good, and one of the best to hear in concert last year. "Magnificent" was also a good cut from that album. Otherwise, Horizon is probably their worst album, that or R&H. So many go nowhere songs. Sad too, because I felt like they wanted to do something different on that album, there are small moments where you feel like they are trying for new sounds or approaches. It quickly falls back on old habits, and doesn't have the tunes to boot.

"Your Blue Room" was one of the last cuts from my ballot. I've never really taken to the Passengers album apart from "Your Blue Room" and "Always Forever Now", but man, those two tracks are some of the best U2 has done. The latter would have fit like a glove on Zooropa (except maybe lyrically). And seeing "Your Blue Room" in concert was a genuine shock. I thought they themselves had forgotten that album.

yeah it was pretty goofy how No Line was preceded with a bunch of talk of an Achtung-style reinvention, and then when it came out it basically sounded like the last two albums minus the hits.

also lol @ just now learning that "I'll Go Crazy" was co-produced by will.i.am

This is super helpful to me, to get an idea of how to listen to the post-Pop albums (this is why *I* like to read critics!). I voted for two of the most obvious songs from this era, but the albums don't cohere to me either. I think it's largely their sound, the production etc.---I have the same problem with latter-day REM & I think it's that my ears don't hear enough modern rock for what's special about these sounds to stick; so even if there are hooks, they wash over me. Aging, I guess, but I don't hold my own perspective to be particularly important & would like to hear them differently, as I care enough about these artists to try to get what they're after (I trust them, in other words, for better or for worse).

I find current REM and U2 disappointing for the same reason, namely that both, I believe, are still so rich with potential. And yet the results are so middling, uneven or misbegotten. If REM needs to do an album in a church, sitting around in a circle or something, U2 needs to let a little more space back into the music, focus less on the charts or young people liking them and more on doing something weird and making young people like that.

Serious question: does it matter if neither band can? Bands have lifespans; they've had theirs.

I really admire Bowie for just stopping, y'know?

if ever there was a band that will never stop touring arenas and stadiums and releasing platinum albums until they start dropping dead, though, it's U2. obviously it's no travesty if they keep shitting up the charts with mediocre product, but it'd be nice if they made better records to justify all that attention.

also Bowie was churning out unremarkable album after unremarkable album for so long that i honestly didn't realize it'd been 8 years since the last one until you just mentioned it.

Does it matter? No, I guess it doesn't matter. But it does devalue the creative currency of both bands when their product starts to sound like product, especially since, as I noted, I believe both bands still have it in them to be great. Not every band does after that long. Then again, Eno has offered a very perceptive reveal of how U2 has long worked. The band writes in the studio, more or less hitting record and then working their way through dozens of permutations of at least that many sketches (you can hear this on Achtung Baby outtakes). Yet the band still works within a an external timeframe, and eventually has to finish the record (see: what happened with Pop). Therefore, admitted Eno, a U2 album's evolution is typically a series of creative ups and downs as songs get worked over again and again. If time runs out when things are great, great. If not, we get incomplete feeling misfires like the last album.

Bowie, it doesn't need to be said, had a good nearly 15 year run of classics before REM and U2 started making their cultural mark, so I'll happily concede the man his contemporary mediocrity. Keep in mind, too, that Bowie retired (probably) because he, you know, almost died.

U2's recorded legacy would probably benefit from if they were one of those bands who issued a collections of outtakes and alternate versions (or Passengers-type side projects) after every album or two.

I think they're one of those bands, like Rush (fittingly, the longest running stable line-up outside U2), that doesn't leave behind much in the way of detritus. Even the famed Achtung Baby outtakes are mostly just take after take of an evolving "Salome" - a b-side.

Side projects, on the other hand, I can get behind.

I don't actually think NO LINE is just a retread in the same mould as the previous 2. I think it does try to do different things. There's much more spoken-word stuff isn't there - 'stand up' and 'cedars of lebanon'? and that and 'white as snow' are newly muted.

But it might just be that it feels different to me cos I bought it on vinyl. I actually think I like it more than the previous 2, though, having made that vinyl-flipping effort.

I guess I agree with Josh that bands can get good again by simplifying things - Trinity Session style etc. It's a pity that that wouldn't work with U2: they're just not that good at playing music together, are they?

I love U2 and value what their creative process has issued, but I get frustrated by talk of 'writing in the studio', 'creative process', 'going away to the south of France for initial sessions, then relocating to New York to work together in a new way' etc ... because I have written many songs and I know all it needs (or WHAT it needs, as Chance in Rio Bravo might clarify) is a pen and paper and maybe an instrument to hand, for 15-30 bewildering minutes, no matter if it's a wet Wednesday in the same old town you grew up in. If you don't have that spark (and one usually doesn't) then the studio shenanigan thing is probably going to be a self-deceiving waste of time.

But it does devalue the creative currency of both bands when their product starts to sound like product, especially since, as I noted, I believe both bands still have it in them to be great.

Does it? Again, I hope I don't sound obtuse. That U2 keep churning out product (as they have since 2000) doesn't devalue by one cent Zooropa, Acthung Baby and the assorted singles and album tracks I consider their best work, in the same way that Stones albums don't devalue their classics.

Unless I'm not reading you correctly...?

also Bowie was churning out unremarkable album after unremarkable album for so long that i honestly didn't realize it'd been 8 years since the last one until you just mentioned it.

So has U2! But we won't agree here.

love U2 and value what their creative process has issued, but I get frustrated by talk of 'writing in the studio', 'creative process', 'going away to the south of France for initial sessions, then relocating to New York to work together in a new way' etc ... because I have written many songs and I know all it needs (or WHAT it needs, as Chance in Rio Bravo might clarify) is a pen and paper and maybe an instrument to hand, for 15-30 bewildering minutes, no matter if it's a wet Wednesday in the same old town you grew up in. If you don't have that spark (and one usually doesn't) then the studio shenanigan thing is probably going to be a self-deceiving waste of time.

But every album since at least The Joshua Tree has been recording in so, er, itinerant a manner (so was Exile on Main Street for that matter). The biographical data doesn't matter so much.

* recorded. Bleh.

Changing my mind with these guys is inevitable, but from where I sit 20 years on, the album being issued as a boxed set that folds out into a jet-ski has fewer good songs than the most recent one--which has a much better and more original production IMO--or each of the three preceding it. As for them not playing well together, I call nonsense.

I am enjoying flipping through parts of the U2 by U2 book, and finding that they withhold a lot of songs for many years before they're done. "Wake Up Dead Man" first took form in the Zooropa days, while "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" dates back to Pop, before Bono came up with the falsetto part. He sang a version of it as his father's funeral.

also Bowie was churning out unremarkable album after unremarkable album for so long that i honestly didn't realize it'd been 8 years since the last one until you just mentioned it.

So has U2! But we won't agree here.

― livin in my own private Biden hole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, August 6, 2011 6:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

hey the last few U2 albums are definitely unremarkable, sure (the difference is that Bowie's were also uneventful, and turned out at a much faster clip)

anyway that posted wasn't actually comparing Bowie and U2, i was really just remarking on wow it absolutely hadn't occurred to me that Bowie finally gave it a rest

'wake up dead man' goes back to 1990-1, it's on the Achtung Baby rehearsal tapes. I was very surprised when they pulled it out 7 years later.

I suppose the Edge, AC and LM can play well together, but I'm not sure they can really improvise, jam, go in and out of other songs, the way that a lot of musicians would. Take a country act like Union Station as a model of 'playing together' - a band really intuitive with their instruments and listening to each other (don't think it matters if you don't like country) - I don't see U2 as able to do that. I think they're too flat-footed, even the Edge too distracted by his epic boxes to really go with a flow. And even if the others can do it, Bono can't play an instrument well enough to join in - though his vocal improvisations on the AB roughs show a different way of joining in.

I think U2 can sound great together, playing a song they know, but I think there's a different sense of 'playing music together' and in that sense I suspect that they're still rather awkward at it.

yeah i don't think anyone's saying they're secretly great jazz musicians or anything, just that in the course of their songwriting method they probably stumble upon and then abandon some interesting ideas.

hopefully this Achtung Baby/Zooropa reissue box set coming out this year will have some cool stuff on it

If Zooropa was the sound of a band whipping something together over a short span, then certainly U2 used to be capable of stumbling into something great. Maybe the problem is that Eno and Lanois are not the producers they once were? I wouldn't discount that, as it's not like those once reliable dudes have been sterling across the board lately, either.

Zooropa was almost twenty years ago; maybe the band's not capable of writing songs that good anymore?

btw A Bigger Bang is better than any Stones album of the last twenty years, and certainly better than anything by U2 released since '93, but U2 could never rely on craft like the Stones (Bono has said repeatedly that they're the worst cover band in the world).

Yeah, Bigger Bang is mostly good, except for the song that sounds like INXS.

I blame Mick for that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loo1I2b7KWY

It was a filthy block of flats
Trash was on the floor

U2 has this problem that I've mentioned a few times here in different contexts, and that is they seem to have lost the ability to write compelling melodies. That last record doesn't have a single memorable tune. Think of how much more melodically engaging songs like "Lemon" or "Stay" are in comparison. I really think that for most songwriters, the "melody muscle" loses tone with age.

"melody muscle" sounds like a euphemism for Hongro dong

haha