U2 - Songs of Innocence POLL

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"delete from library" would've seen numbers

― maf you one two (maffew12), Thursday, December 29, 2022 10:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think I listened to this maybe … twice before deleting it from my phone, and remember nothing about the experience except shrugging.

Straight into the Top 10 of least popular polls ever!

This cannot be definitively answered without another poll. POLLception.

Never understood why 3 songs (use parentheses)

Not a good song, but they should've at least dropped it from "The Miracle of Joey Ramone." If it's going to be a tribute to Joey, even if it's a cheesy one, own it and be firm about it, not like "THE MIRACLE.....of joey ramone..."

I've gone back to this CD. Mixed, but not a very good balance.

First track somehow about Joey Ramone: very poor, surely the worst U2 opening track ever to that point.

Every Breaking Wave: actually OK, sort of subtle and moody backing, melodic movement, some OK words. I like how Bono refers to what 'every dog on the street knows', a phrase I have only ever encountered from Irish people.

California: very workaday rush which seems to aim for raw production but ends on a note of bathos with most of the instruments already finished.

Song for Someone: better, but let down by the fact that 'there is a light / don't let it go out' suggests an image that already has such resonance in pop history, so this seems derivative at best.

Iris: comes closest (on the LP?) to actually doing something great. The swirl of high vocal at the start, the mysterious flavour, is a little like good moments on OCTOBER, say, and times when The Edge mysteriously seemed to be tapping an Irish tone. His fast rhythm guitar on the 'hold me close' breakdown works well. So does the move to the minor chord in the chorus. The late section on 'Iris playing on the Strand' etc is a good buildup of pace. On the other hand, the bridge section about 'something in your eyes' is so musically banal it wrecks the movement of the song, and the late 'free yourself to be yourself' is also a bad coda. Yet I'm not sure that the LP gets better than the best points of this track.