Achtung Pollby

no votes for So Cruel? that's kind of a shame, but also a reflection of the depth of this album, i guess.

this is great, hadn't heard it for years. a Radio 1 interview just prior to the ZOOtv tour, incredible how radical Bono sounds looking back; ranting about corporate sponsorship and the daft-arsed myths of rock, sticking up for indie bands, slagging off rock's 'fat bastards'
and swearing more than Noel Gallagher.

http://u2interview.com/2007/07/16/interview-with-mark-goodier-radio-1/

What went wrong?

ha, good question!

I am listening to this album for the first time ever right now. What Disco Inferno song is a ripoff of "Even Better Than the Real Thing"? Grrr. I can't think of it.

"The Fly" is still the worst track on the entire album.

― Geir Hongro, Thursday, March 26, 2009 3:54 AM (eight years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i miss this man's insanity

He was kind of a Magic Eightball of RONG

Oh man I forgot about this trend in thread titles

Welcome back, my friend

To the Poll that never ends

So Cruel 0

man i woulda voted for "so cruel"

Can I vote for the whole thing

The whole album is awesome, IMO... except for 'Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World', which isn't awesome but still pleasant.

'90s U2 is my favourite U2.

It was the first album they released since I had started to be a fan as a teenager so it was a big deal.
Loved it so much at the time.
Except "Whose Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" which I have always found awful.
I still like all the album. except that song !

I love that song.

me too, it's a huge song

back around the time of this album's release a VHS tape was released that was kind of a haphazard tossed-off promo thing but it's kind of amazing. i bought it at the time and it helped put this album in some kind of context. it's extremely early-'90s.

I don't think(?) it's available anywhere else except as an easter egg on the Live From Sydney DVD.

https://vimeo.com/15070790

Ah yeah, I remember, I had that VHS too !

man i woulda voted for "so cruel"

Same. Especially in 2009.

It's totally unfashionable to say so but I really, really, really love most of this album.

― Lots of praying with no breakfast! (HI DERE), 28. februar 2009 00:30 (ten years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM (still unfashionable, right?)

Edge's ridiculously great solo, swelling keyboard chords, entrance of Bono's Fat Black Lady voice for one final go-around of "The Fly"'s chorus = greatest U2 moment ever.

― The Screaming Lobster of Challops (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, February 27, 2009 7:42 PM (ten years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM 2

Def. the last time U2 was really surprising in its reinvention. I remember the first time I saw the video for "The Fly" and thinking, for some reason, of Depeche Mode. And I know we have talked about the book a million times, but Bill Flanagan's "U2 at the End of the World" is a great companion to this, esp. his I thought really smart read (expanded from a review in ... maybe Musician?) of the album as a sort of extended dissolution of a relationship/dark night of the soul, somewhat hinged on Bono's (in the proud tradition of soul/gospel) conflation of romantic and religious love. I never knew until recently that "Until the End of the World" was apparently about a conversation between Jesus and Judas.

'Lemon' and 'Numb' surprised me more than this entire record. Is it still unfashionable to say you like Achtung Baby and Zooropa? It shouldn't be!

Eheh I listened to "the fly" again yesterday, following this thread's revival : still an amazing song !

This album is loaded with amazing songs. Okay, I'm not a huge fan of 'Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World', but it's still highly listenable and enjoyable.

'Lemon' and 'Numb' surprised me

Eh, I guess so. I suppose I still think of Zooropa as spillover from/adjunct to "Achtung Baby." I used to be lukewarm on "Tryin" but the song is important thematically. It's the last bit of light before the desperation and resignation of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)," "Acrobat" and "Love is Darkness."

yeah "Tryin'" is great . Especially the middle 8/instrumental break, iirc.

it’s great, every song here is great.

the organ and guitar backing is magical

Def. the last time U2 was really surprising in its reinvention.

i think this is still the most surprising reinvention of any band in my lifetime. Blur was sort of surprising, i guess. so many others have tried to change it up in a similar fashion and it's never been as successful or as believable. and that's the craziest thing, the band that made Rattle & Hum three years before just slipped into this new style in such a convincing and confident way.

And they managed to become even bigger (I think ?).
there's clearly an element of going all-in on a risky bet !

i think this is still the most surprising reinvention of any band in my lifetime

great album, and for me their best, but i think the 'reinvention' is overplayed. 'we will record with eno in berlin and rediscover europe after burying our last three albums in american cliches' + making 'the fly' the first single + look at bono's shades! he and the band have invented irony on the zoo tv tour . . . makes it seem like more of a departure than it really was.

'one' and 'ultraviolet' (among others) could have easily appeared on earlier albums; 'bullet the blue sky' and 'exit' and 'god part ii' could have appeared on this one.

mostly it seems like they started listening to the remixes of their own stuff? maybe it is surprising -- most bands wouldn't bother

Julian Cope's transformation from My Nation Underground to Peggy Suicide was at least equally amazing, especially as his trajectory into bonkers territory accelerated. Also he hated U2.

well i kind of meant the entire U2 enterprise was overhauled, across the board. image and design and the music too, imo. the band's new image really emphasized the change, to an extent, and some of the songs could have maybe appeared on earlier albums, sort of...but not easily. they'd have been entirely different in production and performance. i think despite some of the more trad tunes, the reinvention seen in the other tunes couldn't be ignored.

Hum. Of course there's some packaging/marketing/story telling involved but it's hard to deny that their sound/songwriting approach changed A LOT between Joshua Tree/R&M and AB/Zooropa.
I don't think "Bullet the Blue Sky" could have been on AB/Zooropa both lyrically and sonically, for instance.
And some AB/Zooropa songs may have been on previous albums but they certainly wouldn't have sounded the same.

idk I do buy "bullet the blue sky" on AB (tho i don't know the rest of the earlier albums besides the singles). seems like the case is being made for a revolver->pepper's progression, where the band is unquestionably exploring new sonic ground, and the handful of songs that could have belonged to the earlier moment (critics later realize) are camouflaged by a major new look/concept/gimmick that makes it feel like *everything* must have changed...

I dunno, I kind of think everything *did* change. Which is not the first time the band did that - Unforgettable Fire sounds radically different from War and the entire first run, Joshua Tree is pretty radically different from Unforgettable Fire - but I think Achtung Baby was the first time everyone in the band really changed things up at once. Bono's singing is for the first time not just less histrionic but more playful, Larry's drums are not at all martial but dancier but definitely loopier and groovier than he'd been (and he switched to a cranked up snare), Adam's bass is dubbier and, to my ears at least, it's really the first time the Edge seems to be writing around a particular effect for each track. Even on the weirder moments of the previous albums he still had a pretty consistent sound, echo and delay and a bit of distortion and all that. But his toolbox greatly expands with this one, from the first sound we hear to stuff like the (phase?) effects in "Mysterious Ways." It's just a wholesale change in sounds *and* attitude, no longer strident and militant, maybe more ... personal? I think the crowning achievement of the band is that for all of its big changes this far along in a massively successful career, *this* suddenly became the sound of U2, even if people still talk chiming delay pedals and Bono histrionics.

yeah, otm !
Bass&Drums sound completely different from previous stuff.
Lots of sound FX/distorted instruments throughout the album (including on guitars and vocals).
I just listened to "Bullet the Blue Sky" to make sure and it definitely sounds NOTHING like ANYTHING on AB/Zooropa. There's no way it could have been on these albums.

They dialled down the reverb on the drums and Edge got a new set of effects, but the songs - at their core - are very recognisable as U2 songs, so I can see what mookieproof is getting at.

Zooropa is where they really start pushing the boat out. 'Lemon' and 'Numb' are barely recognisable as U2. The former feels like Bono guesting on someone else's record.

Except for the bass and drums, which are very much in contemporaneous character. What sets both of those songs apart really is the practical absence of guitar. If there's guitar in Lemon (from memory), it is very well disguised. And the guitar in Numb is so distorted and weird it is functionally just another synthesizer.

Numb was a really bold choice for a first single for those reasons as well as the fact that The Edge is the lead vocalist, Bono is relegated to the "too much is not enough" part, and Larry sings the "i feel numb". It removes all the comfortable elements from a typical U2 song and inserts some jarring ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvX596FyX40

this is legitimately the weirder one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZImRY8Wgtk

'Lemon' does indeed have guitar on it - those shimmering chords you hear right from the beginning of the song are all Edge's guitar, not a keyboard or synth.

Maybe! But my "Numb" point still stands in that they are functionally not identifiable as guitars. I mean, the drums could be all triggered by guitars for all it really matters.

(Speaking of guitars, I always thought the mood-setting four-note chiming pattern that starts "With or Without You" was a guitar, but on close exploration with a friend we determined it's massively awkward to play on guitar and then learned that it's actually a synth pattern.)

Nobody was arguing your 'Numb' point!

Yeah, that fast pattern at the beginning of 'With or Without You' is sequenced.

I was listening to "Miss Sarajevo" and some other Passengers songs lately and these are so good. E
specially considering how a U2 / Pavarotti political track about Sarajevo and war could/should have been atrocious !
The Pavarotti part which could have been an ott disaster is so moving.
Between Achtung Baby and Passengers, they were basically on fire creatively.
And the best songs from that time were so different from their sound ("The Fly", "The Wanderer", "Miss Sarajevo"...).