The album didn't make a tremendous impact upon initial release, but it's retroactively gone down as one of the greatest debut albums ever made, and I can't disagree with the consensus on this one. Like most bands putting out their first album, their sound didn't appear from thin air; there are a good number of influences that can be extracted from listening to this, but the comparison point that seems most pertinent is Joy Division. There's the same kind of professionally minimalist tightness and anthemic power that characterized the best aspects of Joy Division, but the mood is far less oppressive and bleak than the mood on Unknown Pleasures and Closer, and regardless of Bono's protests, I'd much rather listen to Bono on this album than Ian Curtis on those albums. I like those albums plenty, don't get me wrong, but this album strikes me as representing the full potential of the Joy Division sound, the potential that could have been reached without the emotional straight-jacket that featured so heavily on those albums. This album is all about the sense of wonder that comes from being a young man ready to take on the world, without having been forced to consider the logistics of such ambitions. Later U2 would sometimes take this sense to ridiculous extremes, depicting people who not only want to take on the world but have an elaborate 14-point plan for doing so, but at this point the band is depicting a great combination of ambition and charming innocence, and it makes for a great effect.

In terms of the music, the band is already centered around the guitar work of The Edge, who has taken the post-punk approach of guitarists like Bernard Sumner and Tom Verlaine/Richard Lloyd and extended it into a style pretty firmly his own. People who primarily know the band from The Joshua Tree and later could be rather surprised at hearing him on this album; his great tone is already in place, but there's very little in the way of the kinds of effects that would characterize his later work, and all of the interesting guitar work on here happens in a pretty standard manner (without studio trickery aside from layering parts on each other). The opening "I Will Follow" puts him on immediate display, centering around a very simple but powerful riff underpinned by great drumming (and a glockenspiel!), and the various drop-outs from and crescendos back into the main riff are worth listening to on their own (Bono gives a forceful and crisp delivery himself). "Twilight" centers around two different simple guitar parts (the two parts each morph and grow through the song) circling around each other in support of a dark mystical atmosphere, punctuated by Bono's "TWILIGHT!!!" and "Boy meets man in his shadow" calls, and it features an impressively hellish mid-song passage centered around a set of angry-sounding guitar parts. The 8-minute combination of "An Cat Dubh" and "Into the Heart" is a fascinating combination of barely suppressed lust and exotic but controlled atmosphere, growing into something gentle and uplifting, but what ultimately makes it a borderline classic is the quiet mid-section, where The Edge plays a very small number of notes and chords over the same bass note played seemingly a gazillion times. For some reason, all CD pressings break the two tracks apart, but I can't imagine any circumstance where I would want to listen to one without the other; "An Cat Dubh" needs the fade into darkness to be complete, and "Into the Heart" needs the full effect of going into darkness and back into the piano-supported optimism of the end to be complete.

"Out of Control" is another classic, driven by a huge guitar sound playing a big fat simple riff (with The Edge eventually absolutely RIPPING IT UP) and Bono preaching it, but after this point the album becomes a little less immaculate. "Stories for Boys" is nice but can't help but remind me a little too much of "Twilight," and the next three tracks are ones that I could somewhat take or leave. "The Ocean" is a pleasant bit of 1:34 atmosphere about wanting to change the world, and both "A Day Without Me" and "Another Time, Another Place" feature the same interesting approach as the first half of the album but without all of the interesting melodies and great builds and fades that made the first half so intriguing. Fortunately, the album recovers very well in the last two tracks. "The Electric Co." effectively showcases the "controlled but frantic" approach that the band demonstrated in some of the earlier tracks, and it's a rousing blast. And finally, "Shadows and Tall Trees" rambles a bit in the verses and never gets to the climax of the song as quickly as I wish it would, but that climax, with Bono and The Edge singing out "SHADOW! SHADOW! SHADOW! Shadows and taaaall trees," is an amazing one, and worth the wait.

Yes, the album sags a bit in the middle, like so many U2 albums do, but there's a lot of tremendous material to compensate, and more than that there's a unity and identity in the sound that helps make this album strike me as a good deal better than the sum of its individual tracks. For all of the great material on here, this is a case where I don't think of this album as "that one that has 'I Will Follow' and 'Twilight' and 'Out of Control' on it," but instead I merely think of this album as Boy. If you've burned yourself out on The Joshua Tree and the idea of hearing more U2 doesn't thrill you, give this one a few serious listens and see if you soften on the band a bit.

So why does this get a solidly good grade? Because the instrumental parts are surprisingly interesting, and while individual songs may not consistently leave a strong impression on me after they're done, they entertain me a good deal when they're going. A good example of a song that only features an average Bono performance but is nonetheless entertaining is "I Threw a Brick Through a Window," which may be a bit rambling overall but which centers around an AMAZING anthemic guitar line from The Edge, and which also highlights Mullen bashing around in a delightful manner. Yes, the song is dreadfully overlong, and I mostly end up only remembering the guitars, drums and snippets of the vocal melody, but I enjoy those bits, and that's enough. Much of the rest of the album falls under this same umbrella of moderately forgettable when over but full of intrigue when on; sometimes these tracks are atmospheric and moderately pretty ("Tomorrow," "October," which makes heavier use of The Edge on piano than anything the band did on the debut, "Scarlet"), sometimes they're energetic blasts ("Fire," "With a Shout (Jerusalem)," "Is That All?"), and sometimes they're a combination of the two ("Stranger in a Strange Land"), but they all strike me as ideal "deep cuts" for this era of the band. My favorite of this bunch is the closing "Is That All," an energetic explosion where The Edge's guitar absolutely ROARS, but I could see a good case being made for any of the others in this group.

The initial stretch of the album contains another relatively minor but enjoyable track ("I Fall Down," which weirdly reminds me of solo Peter Hammill for some reason), but it's ultimately "Gloria" and "Rejoice" from this stretch that people remember about this album, and for good reason. These tracks are where the bombast and hugeness of the sound get set to maximum power, especially in the way that The Edge takes on the guise of Creator And Destroyer Of Worlds, and while the effect of these two tracks is a little ridiculous if I think too hard about it, I'm too busy enjoying myself to think too hard about it. The rhythm section is doing all sorts of interesting things as well (even Clayton has some notable variety in his playing in "Gloria"), and Bono sounds like he's trying to outsing the whole heavenly choir by himself, and both tracks are just a big fat spiritual blast. That said, if you like these tracks (and you should), but you're somebody who likes to shoot down prog rock for being too bombastic and pretentious, then you're a blazing hypocrite.

Overall, there may be a shortage of top-notch fully-formed songs in the traditional manner here, but at the same time I feel like this album gives a sense of what would it be like to hear early U2 in rehearsals, and it's eye-opening to me that a collection of rushed, not-fully-fleshed-out material would still sound so engaging. This isn't a must-own by any stretch, and I can completely understand why it's been overshadowed by the albums on either side of it, but it's definitely worth tracking down for anybody who's gotten beyond the initial stage of buying U2 albums and wants to go a little deeper.

Still, while I find myself most drawn to listening to Mullen here, I would definitely say that Bono is a blast here as well. He gives especially notable deliveries in the big hit singles "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Years Day," but I also get a kick out of hearing him ride the grooves of "Seconds" and "Two Hearts Beat as One" ("YOU CAN'T STOP THE DANCE!!!") and give extra emotional oomph to "Surrender" and the closing "40," among others. Regarding The Edge, his role is certainly different from how it was on Boy or October, as there is a relative shortage of clearly stated riffs and memorable solos, but his presence is always felt, and whenever I decide to shift my focus explicitly to his playing, I usually find him doing interesting things. For instance, in the somewhat overlooked "Like a Song," I find the way his frantic parts weave around the pounding drums to be pretty intoxicating (especially in that pounding passage in the end), and the brief solo in the middle is just great, if slightly undermixed.

In terms of individual tracks, there are some entries that, if not exactly bad, strike me as relative weak points. "The Refugee" sounds a little awkward to me, with Bono taking on a weirdly "macho" voice over instrumentation that's messy even by the standards of the album, and it's probably the closest thing to a bad song on the album. "Drowning Man" is also not especially a favorite of mine, as it's kind of a rambling "ballad" that hitches its wagon to a Bono performance that's full of power but also has too little coherence for my liking. Fortunately, I basically like every other song on the album, even "Red Light," which I didn't originally care for; I eventually came to like the way the big typical U2 parts blended with the trumpet parts and the odd female backing vocals. The remaining "deep cut" (aside from these and "Like a Song") is "Surrender," which combines the usual tight rhythm section (with Mullen doing most of the cool stuff) with The Edge making all sorts of hellish noises (albeit awfully reminiscient of David Gilmour on The Wall) in the breaks, and if there's such a genre as "arena protest disco," this track would probably be one of its cornerstones.

As fun as it is to talk about some of the more obscure material on the album, there's a reason the better known cuts are revered so much. "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is almost not worth dissecting, but as ubiquitous as it might be, I find it worth mentioning that the song always sounds a little different to me when I hear it after a long absence than I remember it. The Edge has that simple rolling guitar line in the beginning, but he quickly becomes part of the gritty texture while Mullen and Bono dominate the sound, and the incessant bits of violin are probably not crucial but are nonetheless quite welcome. "Seconds" is a surprisingly successful (for a bunch of white guys from Ireland) melding of a funk bassline into a simmering protest song about soldiers and atomic bombs, and while The Edge doesn't have quite the power of Bono as a vocalist, he does quite well for himself in the bit where he takes lead vocals. "New Years Day," then, is a track that I would mark as the best song (without sharing the title with "Sunday Bloody Sunday") if I had any balls. Like many U2 songs, it feels more like a medley of interesting ideas than a song with a clear coherent structure (unified primarily by the "I will be with you tonight" chorus), but those ideas are so entertaining that I can't hold this against them. The simple piano line, the ever-morphing guitar parts, the "Say it's true, it's true, and we can break through" part ... what a great song.

The album rounds out with "Two Hearts Beat As One" (another instance of pounding arena disco that seems to put its focus on shaking asses rather than sharing a message like "Surrender") and "40" (a gentle anthemic number that centers around a mantra of "How long to sing this song," a clear call-back to "SBS"), and these help cement the sense that this album is a classic. And it is a classic ... but I feel like that statement requires qualifiers, as well as an explanation as to why I would rate this below Boy. I like the general approach the band takes on this album, with the increase in Bono's and Mullen's importance and the reconfiguration of The Edge's role, and I like the production approach of stripping down the echo and throwing gobs of other instruments and voices into the mix, but at the same time I feel like there's a significant opportunity cost involved in this new sound. I miss the mystical atmosphere of so much of Boy. I miss the monstrous riffs and soaring leads of the kind that The Edge often played on October. I miss the slight childhood innocence of those albums, largely gone and stomped to pieces here (hell, just contrast the British cover of Boy and this one), as the band is now trying its best to legitimately change the world. And, well, I miss the way the band used to make its songs a little more cleanly structured, as opposed to a dumping ground for ideas. These are all relatively small issues compared to all of the goodness that this album presents, but these are issues nonetheless, and the kind that can bump a rating down a grade. Regardless, though, this is a must-own album for any fan of the band, and for most fans of rock music in general.

Ideally, the live album that ultimately followed this video would have presented the soundtrack to all or most of the film (the original film was only 55 minutes long, and the DVD was expanded to 82), but instead the live album only lasted 8 tracks and an inexplicably short 35 minutes. Furthermore, only 2 of the 8 tracks come from the show: "Gloria" and "Party Girl," a relatively low-key (except for Bono's working of the crowd) number in which Bono sounds more like Trevor Horn than his usual self. Another rarity ("11 O'Clock Tick Tock," a pre-Boy single that sounds exactly like a typical Boy track) comes from a Boston show, and the rest comes from a later show in Germany. "I Will Follow," "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "The Electric Co.," "New Year's Day" and "40" all sound pretty much like you'd expect live versions of them sound, which means that they're good alternate versions that don't really add much to their respective originals. I admit that I haven't gone through and done a careful comparison of the versions here to the corresponding versions on the DVD, so I don't really know which is better or worse, but I feel like somebody made a mistake by not deciding to just use the film versions.

I can't give this album an especially high grade due to the way it feels a little pointless and ill-conceived, but at the same time all of the individual performances are fine, so it's hard for me to hold too much against it. Even if less than ideal performances were chosen, the album does nonetheless give a proper sense of young Bono as the rock equivalent of a pentacostal preacher, seeking to create a spiritual connection of sorts with his audience and to lift them up. Or, if you some less religion-oriented praise, just try to resist pumping your fist like a madman when "I Will Follow" and "New Year's Day" come on and nobody's around, I dare you.

The album roughly divides into two broad categories: tracks that the band could have theoretically done with Steve Lillywhite at the helm but that would have sounded quite different, and tracks that only could have happened with Eno and Lanois at the helm. The first two tracks, "A Sort of Homecoming" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)," are good examples of the former. "A Sort of Homecoming" is a straight-ahead uplifting anthem, yes, but Eno's fingerprints are all over this one, from the treatment of the guitars in particular (the "scraping" sounds near the beginning are an obvious example, but more generally is the way they are frantically in the service of providing an effective atmospheric backdrop) to the general approach of making every instrument sound great individually while simultaneously not allowing anything to overshadow a fantastic Bono performance (and yet without making Bono's dominance in the sound seem excessive). Even better is the following "Pride (In the Name of Love)," even if, as Bono himself admitted, the lyrics are a little underwritten and come off as sketches. Eno actually had little to do with this one, handing off the bulk of the production duties to Lanois, who creates an enormous sound out of the main guitar theme (which is constantly varied and mutated in a way that makes calling it a "riff" not seem quite right) and the big fat chorus. Plus, I have to say that I agree with the advice of Eno, Lanois and The Edge to leave the lyrics in a a slightly unfinished manner; the first couple of times I heard the song, I thought they were kinda tacky, but their relative simplicity grew on me, whereas a more philosophically sophisticated approach to the song's subject matter might have been obnoxiously overbearing.

The first category, best as I can tell, has two more entries: "Indian Summer Sky," in which Bono sings over a frenetic mix of busy guitars and synth sounds but which could easily have been done as something closer to "Surrender" without too much difficulty, and the closing "MLK," which is done here as a very sparse and gentle elegy over low-key ambient keyboards but which could have easily been done as something closer to "40" without too much difficulty. In each case, I think the way they were actually done far surpasses the hypothetical counterpart I can imagine (the ease with which "Indian Summer Sky" makes me imagine a September sunset on the plains is incredible, and the reverence in "MLK" for its namesake is much grander than it would have been as a lighter-swaying anthem), but I can nonetheless reasonably imagine these hypothetical counterparts. The other six tracks, though, are impossible to imagine outside of the guiding influence of Eno and Lanois. One of them, "4th of July," is an honest-to-goodness ambient track, based around a simple Clayton noodle with some sparse guitar bits and a synth underpinning it, and it's not that far from the sort of thing one would typically hear on Ambient 4: On Land or similar albums. Three others, while containing vocals and standard instrumentation that would disqualify them as ambient, are nonetheless very heavily based around atmospherics, and betray Eno's input. "Promenade" can float by in its 2:35 without making much of an impression if I'm not paying attention, but the mix of the gentle guitar, Bono's voice, and the low-key bass and keyboards strikes me as very pretty when I make an effort not to fade away from it. "Elvis Presley and America" might be a step too far in Eno's attempt to capture a spur-of-the-moment atmospheric experience, though; the instrumental backing track is a little precious even by the standards of the album, and Bono's vocal part is one that he had assumed would be re-done but where Eno decided to use the initial take. Maybe if it didn't last over 6 minutes it wouldn't drag the album's rating down a bit (it's only a bit, but enough to make me like this album less than War, for instance), but as is it helped taint my impression of the whole second half of the album the first couple of times I listened to it.

Along the same lines, and much better, is the live favorite, "Bad," a musing about heroin addiction. The song is ultimately a bit of a drone (only variation in the drumming and occasional appearances of backing synths bring significant variation to the sound), without clear divisions to indicate verses or a chorus, but it's a magnificent drone, punctuated by the glorious moments when Bono sings "I'M WIDE AWAAAAAKE!!! WIDE AWAAAAAKE!!!" It breaks my brain to read that this track was initially criticized as "fuzzy" or "unfocused" when this album was released; thank goodness that people immediately start eating those words once the band started playing it live.

The other two tracks are very far from ambient music, but they still bear the unmistakable imprint of Eno and Lanois. "Wire" sounded like a total mess the first couple of times I listened to it (even if I liked the goofy Eno-driven sound of the guitar line placed on top), but I've come to love it in a rambling stream-of-consciousness jam sort of way the same way I love "Like a Song," even if the two tracks are completely different from each other. Mullen and Clayton are at their best as a rhythm section here, The Edge pulls out every effect and trick he had at his disposal at the time, Bono bellows and grunts and growls as forcefully as he possibly can (those screams and preachings in the last minute are awesome even though I have no idea what he's saying), and the overall effect is awesome. And finally, the title track has way too much polish and sheen and gentle atmospheric guitars and lyrical ambiguity to have been workable on War, though it does provide a sense of spiritual yearning and longing that makes me think of October more than a bit. The arrangement screams out 1984 more than anything else on the album (especially from the sound of the piano and the giant synth chords in the middle), and this took me some listens to get used to, but I've come to view it as one of the album's clear highlights.

In some ways, this is the most interesting album the band ever made; in addition to the band trying to shift its sound in a direction that Eno could work with but also needing to be compelled to take approaches they weren't necessarily prepared to make (some stretches on here definitely give the sense of Eno asserting his will for the purpose of seeing just how far he could push the band), this album also features the band's sudden new infatuation with America, which would be accentuated over the next couple of albums. In this regard, I could understand if somebody even wanted to suggest this as the album's best, even though the slightly elevated number of "lesser" tracks, however important they may be for the album's overall feel, makes me prefer some others over it. Regardless, it's a delightful listen and, in my experience, a major grower; if you listen to it once and dismiss it as having a couple of good songs and a bunch of atmospheric junk, please give it another shot.

Aside from the odd track ordering, there are two main properties of the album that stand out most to me. The first is that, in terms of production, the band and Eno/Lanois seem to be much more on the same page this time around than on The Unforgettable Fire, where the two sides seemed to be feeling each other out in a lot of ways. The album sounds fantastic, and what the overall sound may lose in experimentation it gains in clarity and a sense of timelessness (part of the reason that people went gaga for this album no doubt comes from the way this album sounds so much unlike mainstream music of the previous few years). The second is that the band decided to take its growing obsession with America, with all the good, bad, and mythical associated with it, and milk it for all it's worth. This obsession had already manifested somewhat on The Unforgettable Fire, what with the references to Martin Luther King and Elvis Presley and the 4th of July, but there's a power and conviction in the band's single-minded commitment to commenting on America on this album that makes it stand out from that one. Sometimes the connection to America is in absorbing American musical styles and meshing them with what they already did well; sometimes the connection comes from singing about America-centric topics, good or bad; and sometimes the connection comes creating sound paintings that tap into the mythological aspects associated with the landscape of America, especially the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains. Now, if somebody feels no connection whatsoever with the American mythos, and doesn't see the big deal of an album centered around America as opposed to one centered around any other country, then this could all easily feel like a giant put-on, and maybe it somewhat is. And yet, for all of the ways the band draws upon America in making this album, it never sounds to me like they're exploiting America, somehow trying to use affection for the country to mask significant lack of inspiration, and the point is that I can't hold their single-minded focus on America against them on this album (in contrast, much of Rattle and Hum could be considered America Porn).

The first four tracks may be drastically overplayed, and I could understand never wanting to hear any of them again, but they're such an immaculate stretch of material that it was pretty much inevitable that they would ultimately suffer such a fate. The band had dabbled in imagery associated with the sun over the plains in "Indian Summer Sky," but that was only a warmup for the gloriously cinematic depiction of a rising sun over the prairie that marks the opening keyboards of "Where the Streets Have No Name." Other people may hear the opening differently, but the opening portion of the song unmistakably evokes this imagery for me, followed by a cowboy riding in from the distance with cattle ahead of him as The Edge's iconic guitar part glides into focus, and the song has long reminded me of the idea of the West as a glorious place where one is free to make themselves into whatever their grit and dreams will allow them. What's funny to me is that, in most contexts, I have absolutely no love for or emotional connection to the Great Wide Open (I'm pretty much the definition of a city slicker), yet this song is able to grab onto something so primal within me that it is able to make me have feelings quite unlike what I'd normally feel. Yes, the analytical part of me notices that the vocal melody isn't one of Bono's tightest, but WHO THE HELL CARES when any random moment in this song can start bringing tears to my eyes if nobody is paying attention (especially the "And when I go there, I go there with you" part)? This is one of the best album openers I can think of from anybody.

The following tracks are certainly no worse, though. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" is essentially a gospel song, an expression of deep faith crossed with seeds of doubt, and the combination of the vocals (not just Bono's powerful lead but also the strong backing vocals, including Eno himself) with the nagging arpeggios from The Edge over a fascinating drum beat make it worthy of all of its love and admiration. I'm not fond of the decision to use an actual gospel choir in Rattle and Hum, as I find something tacky in removing all ambiguity from the song's gospel leanings, but this has no impact on my feelings for the original. "With or Without You" breaks from the album's pattern of having some connection to America, but that doesn't really matter; any violations of the album's "conceptual integrity" are more than compensated by the combination of the low-key keyboards and the amazing sounds The Edge gets out of his guitar, including the great bits from The Infinite Guitar. The minimalist riff and the minimalist soloing at the end, in particular, are incredible. And finally, the initial stretch concludes with "Bullet the Blue Sky," in which the band angrily gives its take on the hell that the US could inflict on other nations, in particular the involvement of the country in the El Salvador civil war a few years previous (in future years it would be attached to other topics as needed). All of the gentle joy and uplift of the previous tracks gives way to pure rage, whether in The Edge's angry opening chords and grumbling soloing, or in Bono's growly singing and speaking, or in the pounding drums or in the pounding bass. I have to admit that I laughed a bit the first time I heard Bono saying, "ONE HUNDRED! TWO HUNDRED!" but I've come to love the spoken part, especially the way he says, "Outside it's America. Outside it's America. America" with The Edge's guitar essentially providing an angry "Amen" each time before going off into another rage-filled solo.

If the album could somehow maintain this level of quality and emotional intensity for the next 30 minutes, it would be one of the five greatest albums I could think of, but it lets up considerably, though this just means the next five tracks are clearly "good" rather than "great." Actually, I'd say that the jaunty "In God's Country" comes close to being a minor classic, thanks to that rousing guitar part at the beginning and in the breaks (the guitar tucks well into the background whenever Bono sings the fun melody, except in the last minute or so), but the other four tracks (prior to the two tracks at the end) have nothing to be ashamed of. "Running to Stand Still" is clearly meant to evoke Appalachia in the beginning, but it ultimately sounds like a decent sequel to "Pale Blue Eyes," and that's not a bad thing. "Red Hill Mining Town" is actually about Irish unionized miners more than about any American workers, but it makes a concerted effort to meld American folk music with The Edge's growling guitar and Eno's prominent keyboards, and Bono does his very best to put passion into a topic with which he had no real connection. "Trip Through Your Wires" is a bluesy waltz (!!) with Bono on harmonica, and if it's overly simplistic it's still a blast, while "One Tree Hill" is another turn from the album's America obsession, this time towards a roadie from New Zealand who died just before the band started recording the album (the music is based around a keyboard-driven jam that ends up sounding oddly ethnic for the band, with a very passionate vocal on top). If these tracks are filler, as I've seen some people go so far to dismiss them, then I wish all filler was like this.

Where the album slightly derails is in "Exit," which in my CD copy begins with a Gospel-like coda to "One Tree Hill" (I have to assume that there are CD versions that fix this separation), then turns into a dark jam (edited down from something far longer) that expresses pure angst while Bono sings about a killer using vaguely religious imagery. I guess it's notable for how much of a diversion it is from the rest of the album, in that it's the first time the band had tapped into the really dark and disturbing side of Eno (the kind that manifested in the studio version of "Drugs" way back on Fear of Music), but it's so jarring after everything that came before it that, after hearing this album a lot of times, I still can't make total sense of it. It's not enough to make me knock the album from its position of my favorite U2 album, but it does help make the gap between it and Boy narrower for me than it should probably otherwise be.

At least the album closes on a decent note, even if it's on another weird and Eno-heavy note. "Mothers of the Disappeared" wraps up the album's look at America in a pessimistic way lyrically, this time focusing on the awfulness that came from backing Pinochet and related entities, at the expense of the well-being of many of those in South America at the time. Bono's vocal part is deeply mournful, yet the music has a vague tinge of optimism, and the nagging drum loop is odd enough that it ends up amplifying the ambiguity of these conflicting emotions. Ultimately, for an album that was meant to be about the band's (especially Bono's) mixed-up feelings about the USA, this is probably the ideal way to go out.

This isn't a perfect album by any means, but it's still a marvelous experience, and I'm glad that I came across this just late enough in my development as a rock music listener for me to absorb this fully without ever having a chance to burn myself out on it. If you've somehow never heard this album, please be sure to give it a few listens, and if you've burnt yourself out on it, be sure to come back to it after giving it a rest for a few years. Not only is this the peak of U2's career, but it also cemented Eno as somebody who would be relevant as a producer much longer than some might have thought possible, and that's enough for me.

The rest of the album consists of studio work, more or less making this the studio follow-up to The Joshua Tree, but while these tracks are basically enjoyable, they strike me as a pretty gross miscalculation on the whole. Essentially, the band's newfound love of folk music (American and Irish), as well as other forms of American music, lured the band away from its essential strengths, and it also led to a temporary split from working with Brian Eno (the music is produced by a man named Jimmy Iovine). There's nothing especially wrong with "Van Diemen's Land" (which is a rather pretty folk-protest song sung by The Edge), "Desire" (a very American-sounding acoustic rocker built around a Bo Diddley beat) or "Hawkmoon 269" (another very American-sounding rocker with a slightly more bombastic production than "Desire"), but when I listen to these, I get the feeling that the band didn't really understand why The Joshua Tree was such a success. Yes, the album featured a good helping of American music elements and of American-based imagery in the lyrics, but what made the album work was the grafting of these elements onto the band's core sound and the way Eno's production tricks made this mixture of elements sound. It's almost as if the band thought it had somehow stumbled upon some sort of artistic loophole, where the simplest way to make great music that everybody would love would be to sound as authentically American as they could, but it's hard for non-Americans to make great albums taking this approach (the stand-out exception is Exile on Main Street, but The Rolling Stones absorbed American music way better than U2 ever could). By the time I've gotten through "Angel of Harlem" (a big band gospel number in praise of Billie Holiday), "Love Rescue Me" (a decent collaboration with Dylan that would have made a good Oh Mercy track) and "When Loves Comes to Town" (a decent blues-rock collaboration with B.B. King, who is by far the most notable part of the track), I find myself incredibly tired of hearing the band wasting its time making music that doesn't suit it.

The other three studio tracks break from this pattern pretty strongly, and this helps make the album a little more interesting at the end. "God Part II" is an interesting preview of the band's future approach, largely courtesy of the pounding beat and the most contemporary production the band had had yet, and while I roll my eyes a little at Bono's lyrics (it's basically a sequel to John Lennon's iconic "God" from Plastic Ono Band), I do like hearing The Edge working in a clearly different mode than he'd been using recently. The best tracks, though, are ones that have a stylistic foot in the band's recent past. "Heartland" had been worked on here and there during the sessions for The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, and while the production doesn't have the same great sheen that Eno/Lanois could have provided, the song provides the same mystical atmosphere of much of the material from those two albums. The song is full of low-key tension, only slightly released in the moments when Bono sings the title in falsetto, and it probably would have been the best track (after the big 4, obviously) on The Joshua Tree had it been included there. And finally, "All I Want is You" is one of the band's best ballads yet (even if the orchestrated ending goes on far too long for my tastes), building from a quiet foundation based around relaxed guitar lines (with sporadic string parts here and there) into an emotional frenzy when the guitars get loud in the middle, and it accomplishes the task of making me feel a little better about the soundtrack as a whole when it comes to an end.

Still, a couple of superlative studio tracks, a handful of ok studio tracks and a major mixed bag of live tracks does not a good album make. This album (the studio tracks, anyway) was a complete evolutionary dead-end for the band, and the best I can say for the band in regards to the live tracks is that they apparently realized that the performances put on display here were not a good look for them. The best songs are worth obtaining individually, but if you're buying U2 albums, this should be one of the last ones you get.

The first couple of times I listened to this album, which was well after I had absorbed the band's best 80s albums, I didn't like it much at all, and I felt bewildered that it had gone down as an all-time great album. In retrospect, I had made the mistake of grabbing onto a certain idea of what U2 was "supposed" to sound like, and I allowed myself to be swayed by suspicions that significant departures from this sound would have to indicate a shameless attempt to stay current with a music scene that had passed them by, along the lines of (*shudder*) Bowie in the 80s and 90s. In subsequent listens, however, I softened a great deal on this, largely because I became rather impressed with just how comfortable the band sounded taking approaches completely unlike what they had done before (as a comparison point, this is probably a greater departure from the band's previous work than The Unforgettable Fire had been from the band's work to that point). Where the band had previously worked in long, flowy, lyric musical ideas, this album works in short, punchy, and erratic ideas. Where the band had previously sought to make things sound beautiful and glorious, this album works with dirty, gritty, and slimy ideas that leave the brain feeling like it might need a shower. Where the band previously sounded solemn and serious, this album is flippant and self-deprecating, and so on. The changes made by the various individual entities are no less fascinating than the changes at a macro level. Bono takes approaches he hadn't attempted yet, whether through distorting his vocals in some spots or crossing his angelic upper register with a demonic lower register in a way that makes his upper register sound kinda sleazy. The Edge's guitar playing suddenly embraces noise and distortion to a degree completely unheard of for him previously, and there are a lot of passages that could easily be described as both ugly and beautiful. And finally, the rhythm section manages to completely transform; it's always risky when earnest white guys suddenly try to incorporate funk or hip-hop influences into their styles (and boy, when it goes bad, it can go really bad), but Mullen and Clayton manage to do a good job of underpinning the noisy chaos above with parts that are dancable, interesting, lively, but also cold and detached in a way that seems more and more appropriate with every listen.

In terms of categorizing the album's individual tracks, it seems most useful to me to break them into ballad and non-ballad categories. Both categories have their weak spots, but they each have some tremendous material as well. The non-ballad material gets the album off to a rip-roaring start, courtesy of "Zoo Station" and "Even Better Than the Real Thing." "Zoo Station" opens in a purposefully disorienting manner, with a growling up-and-down guitar sound in one channel and a burst of drums in the other, before moving into a sort of industrial disco with processed Bono vocals declaring the need to do something different. The song has a brief moment where the sound becomes a little clearer and less covered in electronic scuzz, but it's only a moment, and all of the electronic scuzz makes for a great song with one interesting idea after another. "Even Better Than the Real Thing" shows that the new version of The Edge can be every bit as rousing as the classic version of The Edge, as the song centers around a monster of a descending riff in the chorus (but also features a slide bit in the middle that sounds trippy in context), and the song plays well off it, especially in the "TAKE ME HIGHER!!!" parts that are a nice nod to Sly and the Family Stone. A couple of tracks later comes "Until the End of the World," lyrically centered around a conversation between Judas and Jesus, and musically centered around a funky effects-laden riff with Mullen and Clayton going nuts underneath; it's not one of my very favorites on the album, and I think some people are a little too seduced with the "shocking" nature of the lyrics, but it's a nice track.

The next two non-ballads are great. "The Fly" was one ballsy choice for a lead single, with Bono alternating between tense distorted vocals in the verses and a soaring falsetto in the chorus, and the band continues in the funky/industrial vein of "Zoo Station," with The Edge zipping up and down and around the mix like the song's namesake. If Bono and The Edge are the main stars of "The Fly," Mullen and Clayton are the stars of "Mysterious Ways," which features them locking into a hell of a funky groove (and Clayton's bass tone is AWESOME in this song) while Bono does his quasi-preaching and The Edge breaks out a funk wah-wah sound over occasional synth blasts. The final two non-ballads don't strike me as quite as great, but they're interesting enough. "Ultra Violet" starts off sounding like it's going to be a fascinatingly directionless atmospheric ballad before turning into a pretty conventional anthemic pop- rocker, though featuring the amusing detail of Bono reveling in the lyrical cliche of "Baby baby baby" in the chorus, which a younger Bono would never have dreamed of doing. "Acrobat" is a little better, sounding like an Irish folk song sent to hell and back and covered in electric guitar-filled rage (there's an especially angry passage in the middle where The Edge sounds like a cross between himself Robert Fripp), but again, when compared to what had come earlier on the album, it doesn't do too much to combat the cliche of U2 albums falling apart a bit at the end.

The five ballads are also quite good on the whole, and they make for good breaks between the more intense material. "One" sounded like one of the tackiest songs imaginable the first time I listened to it, thanks to the "We're one but we're not the same" chorus and the accompanying vibe, but the swaying music is rather nice, and Bono's vocals are rousing without being irritating, and there's just enough unease in the guitars to make it seem not too straightforward. "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" is another example of a song that could have been significantly worse with a few changes the wrong way, but the grumbling guitar chords in the early verses (before becoming a little more shimmering in later verses) always strike me as a peculiar choice (in a good way), and the rousing chorus and the "Don't turn around ..." melody have only grown on me over time.

"So Cruel" is an interesting bit of subdued melancholy stretched over 6 minutes, with a deep piano part and steady drums eventually covered with angelic strings while Bono does his best to convey the broken-hearted emotions The Edge was feeling due to his recent separation from his wife. Well, it's not quite right just to pigeon-hole the emotions depicted in the song as "broken-hearted," but instead I could say that it depicts the confused morass of despair, anger and confusion that comes from something like this. "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World" is lightweight and playful to a degree that would have been complete anathema to earlier versions of the band, but it's a delightful bit of soul-inflected balladry, and the "Gonna run to you run to you run to you" chorus is strong enough to sustain the whole song by itself. And finally, "Love is Blindness" is another song ultimately inspired by The Edge's separation, but it also uses terrorism imagery to great effect, and the bleak lyrics mesh perfectly with the opening low-key church organ, the jittery drums, the throbbing bass, and guitar parts that are the best expression of pain and despair that The Edge had produced yet.

Maybe this deserves a higher grade, maybe it doesn't, but it's still an essential album to own for anybody who thinks they like U2, and maybe even for people who have felt ambivalent about the band to this point. It's one of the all-time great cases of a prominent band facing an "adapt or die" situation and managing to successfully transform itself to meet the new realities of the musical world, and while this ended up as their last top-tier album, it nonetheless allowed the band to have a second life it probably couldn't have had otherwise. I'm not exactly Mr. Early-90s-Rock, but if more music from that era could intrigue me like this, I probably would be.

Eventually, though, there started to be a backlash to the backlash, and this seemed to come largely from collective disappointment with the band's work from Behind onward. The band's maddening conservatism during this era seemed to make an increasing number of people long for the days when U2 had been a band known for trying new and different things, even if their efforts sometimes resulted in duds, and Zooropa is definitely an album full of new and different things. The role of the guitar has been further modified from the band's classic approach into a primarily decorative instrument, with gobs of effects piping through it, and in its place the band has promoted the role of synthesizers into the center of the band's sound. There are lots of sound effects and looped musical sequences, there are embracings of dance music far beyond what the band had previously incorporated into its sound, and overall there's a sense that the band has no interest in sounding at all like it did before Achtung Baby (and often not much like AB either, especially in the lessening of the role of the guitar from that album). At the time, this would have seemed like a minor disaster, but after the world saw U2 would be like when it had lots of interest in sounding like it did before, the adventurous version of U2 suddenly became a lot more palatable.

In retrospect, though, the band probably shouldn't have made "Numb" the lead single and, by extension, the track that people often tend to think of first with the album. The idea of The Edge rapping in a monotone voice over a bunch of guitar and keyboard squeals (with a lot of sampled sounds thrown in, such as a rewinding Walkman) seems like one of the worst in the world on paper, and the temptation is great to let this aspect of the song corrupt one's feelings for the rest of the song (and also for the rest of the album). That said, Bono's over-the-top female opera/soul singer vocals are a very fun touch, and the piling on of various samples makes for a mildly disorienting effect overall, and as embarrassing as part of me still feels to say this, I can't say I dislike it. I wouldn't be thrilled if it ever started playing in the presence of other people, but I can't let that be the main driver of my tastes.

Once I get beyond the "bad on paper, decent in execution" track, I'm left with 9 tracks of material that range from decent to very good or even great, and that makes for a very good album. The opening title track (a commentary on the confusion that comes from a world with so many competing messages bombarding us at once) is one that I particularly like, featuring a long introduction full of spacey synth chords, pretty keyboard parts, and various sound effects (radio signals, some spoken background voices) dumped into a pot, then giving way to a spacey set of wah-wah'd guitar licks that lead into the atmospheric song itself. The quieter sections are lovely and do a good job of previewing Kid A-era Radiohead, but the huge and beautiful sound the band eventually builds into is all the best aspects of U2 and Eno on display, just in a different mode of presentation than people might have been used to. The following "Babyface" features more prominently-displayed guitar in the chorus while Bono sings about an obession with a woman while an off-kilter toy piano churns away in the background (with guitar effects popping in from time to time), and while it's less remarkable than its predecessor (many things are) it's ok enough.

After "Numb" comes "Lemon," which is definitely one of the biggest risks the band ever took. It's 7 minutes long, it's heavily synthesized dance music, it has a lot of Bono singing in falsetto (and other times sounding like Bowie to a degree that I had to check Wikipedia and the liner notes to confirm that he hadn't made an appearance), and it has nothing to do with U2 to this point. The temptation is to assume that a track like this, made by U2 in 1993, would have to suck, but while I went into this assuming it would, I have to say it's rather impressive. What's most interesting to me is that the track doesn't actually sound contemporary; Eno's production (production contributions also came from Flood and The Edge) makes it sound completely detached from any specific era, instead sounding like it belongs to a cinematic depiction of dance music from some undisclosed point in the future. The song centers around a great bassline over a drumline, with various synth effects fading in and out, and the guitars feel oddly distant, as if heard in a dream, and the effect is other-worldly. The mix of Bono's singing with the backing vocals (from The Edge and Eno), especially in the parts where the simple piano lines are heard, is emotional and interesting as well. The first few times I heard it, I thought it sounded a lot like contemporary Bowie (as in Black Tie White Noise Bowie), which is a horrifying insult, but that album would be lucky to have material as epic and tasteful as this track.

The album has one other track that cleanly falls into the "dance rock" category ("Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car," which has some silly horn sound effects at the beginning before turning into a slightly warmed-over version of the "industrial disco" featured on "Zoo Station"), but the rest is much more varied than people often give it credit for, and these tracks make me wonder how many people who purport to hate the album actually have listened to the whole thing. "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" is very traditional and guitar-centric in the arrangements (it doesn't sound like the band's old approach to guitar rock, but it definitely sounds like U2 doing 90s alternative guitar rock), with the band drawing inspiration from Frank Sinatra (the band actually recorded a cover of "I've Got You Under My Skin" with Sinatra as a B-side), and the song ends up sounding like one of the better songs on The Bends. The slow rise of the guitars from the relatively wimpy sound in the verses into the soaring leads in the chorus is one of life's small joys. "Some Days Are Better Than Others" features Bono singing disjointed thoughts over an interesting bassline in the verses, but the chorus is the most interesting part, thanks to the odd guitar part, which sounds distinctly East Asian in both the notes and in the piercing tone. "The First Time" is a return to the band's love of quiet Velvet Underground balladry, this time featuring a version of The Prodigal Son in which the main character decides not to go home due to the advantages of being out on his own, and the combination of the lyrics, the low-key guitars and Eno's prominent backing synths make for a lovely experience. "Dirty Day" probably could have been condensed into 3 minutes from its 5, but I'm glad the ideas were allowed to stretch out as far as they are; the bulk of the song is a slow Eno-heavy atmospheric drone (with Bono sometimes singing low, sometimes falsetto), with occasional angry thick licks thrown in from The Edge, and the climax of the band singing "These days, days, days run away like horses over the hill" is glorious. Maybe it's overlong, and maybe it's a bit of a put-on, but it's a put-on made for me.

Finally, the band brings in Johnny Cash to sing over a synthesized bassline in "The Wanderer," and the cross between the traditional (Cash's voice, the Gospel/Country foundation of the lyrics and vocal melody) and the futuristic (the arrangements) makes for a fun effect. Sample lyrics: "I stopped outside a church house/Where the citizens like to sit/They say they want the kingdom/But they don't want God in it." It's a bit gimmicky to bring in Johnny Cash for the song, but it's a great gimmick. And really, that's probably the best way to sum up the album as a whole; it's not "authentic" rock music, and there's a lot in the way of gimmicky sounds and approaches, but the gimmicks are pieced together in a way that's pretty masterful. As I became better acquainted with this album through time, it occurred to me that this made sense; yes, the circumstances that led to the creation of this album suggested a slap-dash effort (the band had originally meant to put together an EP, then kept adding material until it pushed out a full album much sooner than anybody expected), but this is largely mitigated by the way that, in a lot of ways, this is the U2 album (not counting the Original Soundtracks 1 album done under the Passengers moniker) with the greatest Eno influence (Lanois was off doing other things and had nothing to do with the production), and heavy involvement from one of the great minds of the rock era tends to be a harbinger of quality. If you've written this album off in your mind and haven't listened to it in years, I ask that you give it another try, and if you've put off hearing it, be sure to give it a shot. People whose love of music hinges on the presence of guitars and "rocking energy" will hate this, but the rest of us, especially Eno lovers, can feel free to enjoy this.

The one track on here that will probably satisfy even the most conservative U2 fan is "Miss Sarajevo," written for a Bono-funded documentary about life in Sarajevo (focusing on a beauty pageant) during the Bosnian war, and which takes the form of a low-key Velvet Underground-esque ballad punctuated by an extended sung portion from Luciano Pavarotti. I initially rolled my eyes a little bit at the Pavarotti inclusion, but by the second listen I was over my cynicism; Pavarotti's section, underpinned by an orchestra, is an emotional gut-buster, and what's more it fits in seamlessly with the rest of the song, so it's hard for me to find fault with it. Bono has gone on record as naming this his favorite U2 song, and while I don't agree, it's nonetheless a perfectly defensible choice.

The other tracks with vocals are nice as well, even if they're less "song-like" than one might expect from U2 (then again, after Zooropa, the band should have been given some benefit of the doubt in regards to not following traditional forms). My favorite is "Always Forever Now," which uses a pounding rhythm section part as the underpinning of a gloriously atmospheric and static track, initially covering the rhythm with guitar noise before building into a section of Bono singing the title repeatedly (with Eno singing the same through a vocoder), which in turn moves into a section of strings slowly soaring into the stratosphere. I'll say this: if this had somehow made it onto Zooropa instead of, say, "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" or "Babyface," Zooropa would have gotten dangerously close to entering the Boy/Joshua Tree competition for my favorite U2 album. My dark-horse favorite, though, in which I bypass perfectly solid and atmospheric tracks like "Slug" (built around a solid slow descending guitar and keyboard part, over which Bono sings a sparse vocal part), "Your Blue Room" (built around a solid slow noodly keyboard part, over which Bono sings a sparse vocal part, and which ends with Clayton reciting some lyrics), "Beach Sequence" (where Bono sings and plays piano over lilting guitars and occasional seagull sounds), "Ito Okashi" (in which Japanese vocalist Holi sings slowly over off-kilter moody keyboards), and "Corpse (These Chains are Way too Long)" (where Bono seems to be jumping out of his skin to sound like Damo Suzuki over a dreary background), is the hilariously out-of-character "Elvis Ate America," where Howie B (who also provides the hypnotic rhythm track here) repeatedly growls "Elvis!" while Bono sings sparse and atmospheric lyrics that provide a more authentic sense of the seedy underbelly of America than similar attempts in the Rattle and Hum era. This is a strong candidate for the title of "least typical U2 song with vocals," and I enjoy the hell out of it largely because of this.

The instrumental tracks are sometimes somewhat throwaway individually, but help make for a fascinating kaleidoscope in aggregate. "United Colours" sounds a lot like something that could have appeared on The Drop a couple of years later (this is hardly a bad thing) in terms of the keyboard sounds and the nagging percussion, but it's the disorienting use of saxophone and growling guitar sounds that really make it jump out at me. "A Different Kind of Blue" (which is mostly just Eno messing with his vocals over sporadic percussion sounds) is one I'd be fine never hearing again, but "One Minute Warning" (which has vocals but they're pretty incidental, with bits of Holi voices eventually followed by Eno singing something indecipherable) is a pretty involving mix of chaotic guitar over an ethnic-sounding rhythm track, "Plot 180" is hypnotic guitar sounds and keyboard pings over a hypnotic bass/drums pattern, "Theme From the Swan" is a passable collection of keyboard noodlings with bits of guitar strumming on top (it's not one of the better pieces on the album by a long shot, to be fair), and the closing "Theme From Let's Go Native" sounds like a perfectly solid rehearsal jam from the band, which is just fine by me. Maybe some of these could have been formed into something more "complete" in another context, but they sound just fine in their "unfinished" form here.

Maybe this isn't exactly an important album to U2's legacy, but it's an album that really drives home the idea to me that U2's early 90s period is pretty underrated on the whole, even accounting for the universal love that Achtung Baby receives. Maybe the band had too much self-assurance and had a public persona with too much self-importance by this point, but the band also had a knack for putting out really interesting and clever music that had one foot in contemporary styles but had another foot firmly planted in a desire to add whatever idiosyncracies they felt appropriate. They had managed to age very gracefully without allowing themselves to become old farts, and it seemed like, at the least, U2 was going keep churning out pretty good albums for the forseeable future, all the while maintaining an air of artistic dignity about them.

Well, that was fun while it lasted.

While the Passengers side-project with Brian Eno had been intended to serve as a warm-up and preparation for the band's next proper album (presumably with Eno providing guidance and production as usual), the band decided to go a different direction and dropped Eno from the recording process. In his place the band went with Mark Ellis (Flood), who had helped with the mixing on Achtung Baby and Zooropa, but production credits ultimately went to Howie B and Steve Osborne as well. One of the first challenges the band had to overcome was Mullen's absence during the initial stages of recording and rehearsal, due to him recovering from back surgery. The band used samples and loops extensively throughout the sessions, and while Mullen ended up recording some of his own parts in place of the loops that had originally been used as placeholders, this largely meant that a lot of the percussion on the album ended up as samples of Mullen's own drumming. In terms of the other members, they each engaged in their own fair share of experimentation, which would have been perfectly fine except for the fact that, with all of their messing around, they couldn't create coherent and finished songs quickly enough to finish the album when they said they would finish the album. Despite pushing the deadline back three months, the band was making final additions and changes right up until the very end of the mastering process, and the end result was something that nobody felt entirely happy with.

The album has the same number of tracks as Achtung Baby, and is only about 4:30 longer, but it's a much more tedious and boring listen than AB. One thing that I find fascinating about the album is the relative uniformity of the track lengths; it's an arbitrary range, yes, but it strikes me as a little odd that ten of the twelve tracks here fall in the 4:30 to 5:30 range (or within 30 seconds of 5 minutes), whereas AB had five tracks in this range, which could be stretched to seven if we count "The Fly" and "Ultraviolet," which just miss (Zooropa hits this range in only three out of ten tracks). I mention this because, while the album is fairly diverse in terms of sounds and reasonably diverse in its split between ballads and more aggressive material (much like AB was), it ends up feeling much more monotonous on the whole. The typical pattern of a song on this album is to introduce a single main idea (which is generally between forgettable and pretty good) and stretch the idea out longer than desirable, without throwing in a significant contrasting feature to compensate for the track going on a good deal longer than that idea could support. If every single track on this album was a full minute shorter than it actually is, then this album would sound a good deal better to me and would merit at least an extra notch in the rating, but as is, the continual pattern of "decent idea stretched out too long without a complementary idea to let the track go even longer" ends up getting on my nerves.

In terms of individual tracks, there are ones that I find make little impact aside from a few moments ("Do You Feel Loved," "Miami," which is actually a strong candidate for the worst track the band had done to this point), but most of the tracks are ones that are decent enough in their actual form and potentially much better. "Discotheque" and "Mofo" were the major points where the band tried to carve out a niche in the world of contemporary techno, and they each milk their respective grooves for too long, but both tracks are pretty fun for a couple of minutes, showing a deft mixture of extremely processed guitar and bass with more typical sounds from the band. Much of the rest of the album is either relatively up-beat or rather downbeat mid-tempo anthemic U2 filtered through a late 90s sensibility, with the exception of the amusingly playful "The Playboy Mansion," which is appropriately trashy in the verses and has a delightful up-and-down slide riff in the chorus. "If God Will Send His Angels" and "Staring at the Sun" are decent Achtung Baby-balladry-by-numbers and decent alt-rock-anthem-by-numbers respectively, but it should be noted that both had their origins in the Zooropa sessions, so they have a bit more of a creative spark in them than I first thought. "Last Night on Earth" (another Zooropa leftover) mixes funky guitar/bass and futuristic synths pretty effectively, topping it with a nice chorus, and the following "Gone" (along with "Mofo," the only track to fall outside the time-range mentioned above) does a good job of crossing Bono's self-loathing with The Edge's most interesting and expressive guitar on the album. "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" has a nice low-key atmosphere but is otherwise forgettable, "Please" does a nice job of crossing the bass-driven groove with all sorts of interesting guitar and synth bits (while Bono sings a mournful part about contemporary troubles in Ireland), and the closing "Wake Up Dead Man" is a downbeat plea to Jesus along the lines of "Love is Blindness" from a musical standpoint. Truth be told, I don't really like cramming all of those depressing tracks into the very end, not because it makes the album too much of a downer, but because it doesn't make the album enough of a downer; the depressing effect ends up as less pronounced in aggregate than the individual tracks would suggest it should.

It's pretty frustrating to have a case like this where I like more tracks than not by a pretty comfortable margin, even if I don't really love any of them, and still not especially like the album (I actually originally planned to give it an even lower grade until I counted up the number of tracks I like and decided I had to reconsider). There's a lot of potentially very good material on here, but in terms of actual final product, the only ones that I could make a case for living up to the average material on Achtung Baby are "Gone" and "Please," and even those wouldn't be in the top half of tracks I like from that album. Still, the lessons that should have been learned from this album were (a) of the importance of setting clear intermediate deadlines that would allow them to meet firm album-completion deadlines, and (b) the importance of having variety in song-lengths. Instead, the main lesson the band took away was that U2 needed to sound like what they thought people thought U2 should sound like, and thus ended the "gee, let's see what this sounds like" era of the band. As for the album, I can't give it a glowing recommendation, but there are enough pretty good songs on here that it's worth it for a U2 fan to hear them. Get it if you find it cheap, which shouldn't be hard at all.

From a general philosophical point of view, I'm not thrilled when good bands consciously decide to stop challenging themselves artistically and decide to milk a previously established style that hadn't been used for a long time, but I also recognize that taking such an approach can initially produce good results. The band sounds genuinely reinvigorated in this new/old framework, and what the album lacks in ambition it makes up for with memorability and with how uplifting it is. This is an album that I instinctually want to be pretty cynical about, but every time I listen to it, I find myself genuinely happy that I did so, even if I don't find myself thinking of many of the individual songs as classics. Maybe Bono's voice is clearly a bit weaker now than it had been on The Joshua Tree (since there's no longer an emphasis on hiding Bono's voice behind various effects, it's impossible to mask that age was now starting to have an effect on him), and maybe the rhythm section has mostly sunk into the background and become fairly anonymous, and maybe The Edge isn't doing much that seems unfamiliar, but the total effect is a delightful one.

My favorite songs on the album are actually buried in the middle, after the initial barrage of big hit singles the band used to promote the album. "Kite" reminds me a lot of George Harrison in the verses, due in large part to the repeated descending guitar lick (there's also an extremely Harrison-esque solo in the middle of the song) but also the general vibe (there's also a nagging looped string part that I enjoy in the background of the verses), but the other parts are pure anthemic U2, especially when Bono belts out "I'M A MAAAAAAN, I'm not a child" in the middle. My other favorite is "Wild Honey," a song that's gentle and playful in way that's extremely out of character for the band, and the cross of that lightweight guitar part and Bono singing "You can go there if you please/Wild honey/And if you go then go with me/Wild honey" can stick in my head for just as long as it wants. Mullen apparently wanted it kept off the album for not fitting in with the typical approach of the band, but Bono and Eno fought to get it included, and I'm very glad they did, because it deflates the seriousness of the album just enough to make all of the other material seem a little less monotonous than it might otherwise.

Still, while I like some of the "lesser" material on the album more than the big singles kick off the album (I find it a little silly that the band was so determined to tap into the goodwill of The Joshua Tree that they replicated that album's pattern of sticking four singles in the first four tracks), this doesn't mean that I want to put down those singles. "Beautiful Day" immediately makes it clear that the band is going fairly retro in its approach, thanks to The Edge using a guitar tone typical of its earliest days, but the song actually does a nice job of balancing older aspects with more modern ones, and the upbeat music works well with Bono's lyrics about finding joy in the grandness of the world even when the small details of your life kinda suck. "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of" loosely evokes "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," largely from being the album's second track and having some gospel elements in it, but the connections mostly end there, and this one gets by on a somewhat lumbering but nonetheless attractive melody with organ-like synths underneath and guitars and brass piled on top while Bono sings about wanting somebody (in this case, the recently dead lead singer of INXS, Michael Hutchence) to reconsider suicide. "Elevation" is as close as the band gets to its Achtung Baby days on the album, grinding out a song almost entirely built around Clayton's distorted bass groove and a general swagger, and while this over-reliance on swagger as a foundation for writing music would come back to bite the band later, here it absolutely works thanks to how strong that groove is and how well The Edge and Bono play off of it. The brief quiet mid-section in the middle is a nice touch as well. And finally, while "Walk On" may strap itself awfully tightly to The Edge playing a lick that sounds like a compute-generated cross between a War lick and a Joshua Tree lick, it's nonetheless hard for me to escape how emotional that lick sounds when it's going, and the rest of the song, built around lyrics dedicated to a notable Burmese pro-democracy protestor, is good enough, especially the unexpected and enjoyable "Eclipse"-cribbing in the last minute. These four songs are nowhere near as amazing individually or in aggregate as the four singles that start off The Joshua Tree, but few things are, and they get the album off to a nice start overall.

The other five songs are clearly not meant to be singles, but they're not much worse than that block of four tracks, and this helps make this album a case where the tendency of U2 to front-load its albums with its best material isn't really followed (despite the band's best efforts). "In a Little While" and "Peace on Earth" (which sandwich "Wild Honey") are each decent mid-tempo ballads, with "In a Little While" a little more jaunty and guitar-filled and "Peace on Earth" a little more ponderous and depressing (it's about Bono getting tired of hearing about how there will eventually be peace on earth and wondering why it can't just happen already), and while the latter got a little more attention (especially after 9/11 happened), I find myself liking them about the same. "When I Look at the World" is another slight-but-nice pop-ballad (featuring another Bono lamentation of his faltering faith), this time filled with all sorts of grumbly guitar bits (and some great slide bits here and there) that The Edge apparently had forgotten how to play by the end of the sessions, which cracks me up a bit. "New York" got most of its attention due to the lyrics, which have allusions to Lou Reed and Frank Sinatra and the city in general, but the song's most notable aspect is the contrast between the quiet low-key verses and the louder instrumentation under the chorus, and the song is pretty decent on the whole. And finally, "Grace" makes for an excellent closer, contrasting the loud bombast of so much of the rest of the album with a low-key spiritual musing that shows the band once again tapping into its love of The Velvet Underground's self-titled album; without actually cribbing anything specific from its predecessor, this song strikes me a good deal as a worthy successor to "Jesus," crossing a subtle main guitar part with quiet noodlings in the background and a soft Eno-provided synth underpinning it all.

It may sound preposterous to think this, given that the band members were all still relatively young at the time (40 may be older for a rock musician but it's still in the prime of somebody's life), but I feel like, in an ideal world, this should have been U2's last album. Right or wrong, the band committed itself to the idea that it had somehow gone wayward by engaging in so much experimentation in the 90s, and this album served as a form of penance and showed the band as the returning prodigal son. Unfortunately, the band had now boxed itself in; going forward it could either deviate from its newly purified approach by experimenting and trying different things (which would mean, based on the premise that this album was a form of penance for improper behavior, that the band was engaging in bad habits again), or it could cling to its reformed ways and keep churning out albums in this style (which would mean that a band that had spent most of its life trying new things had completely stagnated, and which would render all future albums somewhat pointless). Still, the consequences of the band's success would be dealt with later; for now, the album itself is very good, and most U2 fans should enjoy it (especially if they disliked Zooropa and Pop).

I mentioned earlier that Lillywhite is the primary producer, and I added the "primary" qualifier because a few songs assign production credits to other people, though strangely this diversity in producers does little to make the album seem less monolithic to me in aggregate. In some cases, the additional production credits come because the origins of the songs date back to previous sessions. The track that's often cited as the album's best, "City of Blinding Lights," dates all the way back to the Pop sessions and thus has a Flood credit, though it should be clear that the song has an arrangement that bears no resemblence to the typical one from Pop. People tend to love it due to the way The Edge's guitar cribs so heavily from "Where the Streets Have No Name" and the way the production calls back to the murk of The Unforgettable Fire, and I guess people like the awkwardly delivered chorus (with Bono placing the em pha sis on ev er y syl la ble). I like the song ok, and it does build a little anthemic steam the longer it goes, but I'd never call it a classic like some would. "Love and Peace or Else" is from the ATYCLB sessions and has Eno/Lanois production, but it doesn't seem very necessary (aside from a couple of neat production sounds); the song is a big dumb mid-tempo protest song (not meant too much as an insult), and it's worth a couple of listens. Another one from the ATYCLB sessions, without Eno but with Lanois (as well as Chris Thomas and Jacknife Lee, who each produce some other songs on this album), is the rather lovely "One Step Closer" (no resemblance to the Asia track), another low-key VU-like ballad with Lanois contributing some very moving pedal steel guitar. Jacknife Lee's primary production credit (with Lillywhite listed as providing additional production) comes with "Man and a Woman," a low-key, bass-heavy, up-tempo number with Bono trying to emulate Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), and if more of the album could have been along the lines of this and "One Step Closer," I'd have to reconsider my feelings towards the album quite a bit.

Chris Thomas (a veteran producer who had gotten his start working with George Martin and The Beatles) contributes to two other numbers: "Sometimes You Can't Make it on Your Own" (which starts off as a decent low-key ballad before settling in generic U2 anthem territory pretty quickly) and the closing "Yahweh" (which wastes no time settling in generic U2 anthem territory while Bono trolls Jews the world over). The rest, then, cleanly belongs to Lillywhite, and I don't especially like the songs that the band worked on with him here. "Vertigo" has a pretty strong hard rock riff, but the rest of the song is just empty strutting and "Two Hearts Beat as One" redux, and it's definitely the band's weakest opener to this point (aside from the live "Helter Skelter" of course). "Miracle Drug" is decent enough; I also liked it when it was called "With or Without You." "All Because of You" was often referred to on tour as "a love song to The Who," but since Clayton/Mullen aren't Entwistle/Moon and Bono isn't Daltrey (The Edge's Townshend imitation is pretty decent), the song is pretty lumbering and awkward. "Crumbs From Your Table" wants to be something from War so bad, and "Original of the Species" wants to be something from Achtung Baby so bad (one of the recycled guitar licks is pretty rousing, I'll admit, but it can't save the song), and the band is dangerously close to dabbling in total self-parody with these.

If you subscribe to the idea of "The U2 sound is great, and close adherence to the U2 sound over the course of an album should result in a very good or great album," then it might seem unreasonable to give this such a low grade; this certainly would have seemed unreasonable in the couple of years after release, when, as typical for the band with non-Pop albums, they won all the Grammys. Unfortunately, this is just too much rigid conservatism for me; maybe the band should have just made Jacknife Lee the primary producer instead of going back to the person they'd originally dumped because they wanted to grow and develop artistically. There are some nice songs on here, but a few nice songs does not a good album make.

Bless their heart, the band actually tried to do some new things, even after bringing on board so many familiar faces. The band spent a good deal of its recording time in Morocco, with the intention of assimilating Arabic and Jewish and other non-European influences into its sound. Unfortunately, while they tried hammering out material that incorporated these influences, they ultimately realized their attempts to incorporate influences from other cultures was producing a lot of music that didn't sound very good, and thus the bulk of it was left off of the album (there's a brief nod to it in the first portion of "Fez+Being Born," which eventually becomes yet another mid-tempo semi-atmospheric semi-rocker, but that's about it). In terms of unusual material that ultimately made it on the album, the closing "Cedars of Lebanon" incorporates a sample from the Brian Eno/Harold Budd collaboration The Pearl (the sampled track is "Against the Sky") before turning into a quiet mostly-spoken piece that only becomes interesting musically when The Edge does a quiet noodling in the background. Oh, and I guess the single "Get On Your Boots" is moderately interesting for sounding like Deep Purple covering "Vertigo" but with a hip-hop edge, but "moderately interesting" in this case equates to "aaaaah, kill it with fire." The rest of the album's "experimentation" is a farce; at most it's in little details, with whatever production tricks Eno and Lanois come up with to try and lend some additional interest to the proceedings.

The album does start off well enough. "No Line on the Horizon" doesn't have an especially rousing chorus, and Bono sounds like he's trying too hard to squeeze out every bit of juice from his increasingly worn voice, but there's a fascinating combination of guitar sounds in the introduction and in much of the song (with a nagging quiet synth part weaving its way in and out of the sound), and all told it's a good opener. Much better is "Magnificent," which marks the first time in a while (in my opinion) that the band had aimed to make a huge anthemic classic and actually bullseyed its target. The slow build in the introduction is a marvel, with sparse low guitar growls followed by bits of synth with bits of guitar, all over a slowly growing martial rhythm, before launching into the main guitar part of the song, which regularly returns in the choruses. Maybe I could nitpick over the verse melody not being especially interesting, but that's a minor complaint when the verses are a relatively small part of the song, which mostly consists of U2 doing U2 instrumental things at a very high level. If The Edge and Mullen are the stars of "Magnificent," then, the star of "Moment of Surrender" is Bono, who gives a great workout in a 7-minute gospel/torch ballad full of emotional climaxes. The Edge gets in some especially lovely Gilmour-esque bits in the middle, and there's some very atmospheric piano sprinkled in throughout, but the song definitely belongs to Bono more than anybody else. I thought it was incredibly cheezy and tuneless the first couple of times I heard it, but sometimes there's something to be said for pure emotional power.

There are two decent tracks out of the rest; "White As Snow" is a re-working of the traditional "Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel" melody into a manipulative but nonetheless moving sone about a dying soldier, and "Breathe" is a grab-bag of interesting ideas that never properly congeals into a fully coherent song but nonetheless limps by thanks to all of the neat individual moments. The rest is quite disappointing, alas. "Unknown Caller" initially sounds like it might be have some atmospheric promise, but it quickly devolves into U2's anthem-by-numbers habits; same goes for "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight," which also has the additional problem of Bono's voice sounding weirdly ravaged even by these late-period standards. "Stand Up Comedy" is a weirdly half-baked attempt at a funky Led Zeppelin imitation; the Led Zeppelin comparison is probably too easy to make, but I can't see a more on-point one, and the band sounds incredibly awkward in the process.

In comparison to Atomic, this one probably has higher high points, but the low points are lower, and overall the album doesn't seem to add any more to the band's legacy than Atomic did. When even Eno/Lanois can't squeeze an above-average album out of U2, you know things are pretty dire. Seek out the better tracks, but don't expect any sort of late-period renaissance just because of the presence of familiar faces.

Part of me also wonders if the rough circumstances that went into the album's creation led the band to some doubts of how well the album would do without some sort of splash or risk-taking in the release process. The original plan had been for the band to release Songs of Ascent, largely consisting of reworked material from the No Line on the Horizon sessions, but this project stalled out, in part because Bono and The Edge got distracted while writing music for their Spiderman musical. The band then went into a period of working on three separate projects: an attempted resuscitation of Songs of Ascent, a dance-pop album, and an album produced by Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, who would be credited as the primary producer of what eventually became Songs of Innocence. The Burton project ultimately became the band's main focus, but this project had many of its own obstacles to conquer, and the band repeatedly would come close to having something finished and ready for release, only to decide the material wasn't good enough and that it needed more work. Eventually the band was given a firm deadline of mid-2014 to get something ready for release, and in a pattern that should be familiar to millions of former college students who at some point did a major semester-long project in the three days before it was due, the band finally crammed out an album in the couple of weeks before they needed it finished.

The band's stated goal during this album's long gestation period had been to make a better album than No Line on the Horizon, and while I believe that they cleared that hurdle, they didn't clear it by much, and the album's overall flow makes for one of the more puzzling and confusing experiences I can remember having. The band manages to avoid the cliche of sticking its best material at the front of the album and the relative scraps in the back, but they avoid it so strongly that I can't imagine they intended the sort of listening experience that I've repeatedly had with this album. Lots of U2 albums to this point had a good chunk of weaker material within them, but I can't think of another five-song stretch from the band that I find as underwhelming and bland as the first five songs on this album, and repeated listens have done little to improve my sentiments towards them. The opening "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)" has nothing to do with The Ramones in the music, even with Bono's statement that the song is about his feelings in watching Joey Ramone sing on stage; the closest the song comes to any "punk" elements is the guitar tone in the main riff, but even that sounds more like Dave Davies (done badly) than Johnny Ramone (done badly), and the bulk of the song consists of the band doing its arena-rock-lite thing on complete autopilot. "Every Breaking Wave" originated in the No Line horizons and was intended to be the lead single of Songs of Ascent, and while the reworked version that eventually made it onto this album is generally considered one of the highlights, I just can't get behind this idea; large parts of it sound to me like a weird combination of "With or Without You" and "Every Breath You Take," and while there are some little twists here and there that I like, the bulk of the song is a chore for me to get through. "California (There is No End to Love)" starts off with what sounds to me like an odd aping of the more mantra-ish sections of The Beach Boys' "Cool, Cool Water," then turns into more typical U2, albeit with a slightly more modern production, and somehow manages to not make a single impression on me beyond the introduction. "Song for Someone" is another one that I'd be tempted to dump into the "U2 by numbers" bucket, but it's actually not that U2-ish; it's such a by-numbers acoustic-ballad-into-lighter-swaying-anthem that I'd normally assume it came from a bad U2 imitator, not from U2 themselves. And finally, "Iris (Hold Me Close)" is a revival of the jittery "Where the Streets Have No Name" lick in a context that would otherwise make no impression on me were it not for the fact that I'm actually rather impressed by Mullen's razor-sharp drumming (not doing anything obviously fancy but very tight in a classic Charlie Watts or Stewart Copeland sort of way) here. Overall, this is a pretty abysmal start by U2 standards, and if the album maintained this level of quality for the rest it would easily be my least favorite U2 album to this point.

Strangely, though, the album gets a lot better after that stretch. "Volcano" may be an aping of Achtung Baby-era U2 just as much as some other tracks to this point were an aping of The Joshua Tree or All That You Can't Leave Behind, but it provides a badly needed blast of energy, courtesy of the pounding rhythm, the great bassline with the monster tone, the fun "Vol! Ca! No!" hook in the chorus, and a bunch of other small details, and it marks the first point in the album where I'm actually glad to be listening to it. "Raised by Wolves" may be yet another "The world is awful and I don't believe in God anymore" rant from Bono, but the music is full of nervous anger that supports it well, largely thanks to a fascinating nagging bit in the backing vocals, but also because of Mullen's controlled and erratic rhythms and the bits of guitar that pop in as necessary. "Cedarwood Road" alternates between hard-rocking bits and softer (but still tense) and more conventionally beautiful and anthemic bits (reminding me of some of the better parts of Pop, especially in "Gone"), and the hard-rocking bits rip as much as anything the band had ever done to this point, thanks to that incredibly intense riff (sometimes played by electric guitar, sometimes layered with an acoustic guitar, and to great effect in both cases) underpinning them.

Amazingly, the album's final three-song stretch is not only better than the perfectly solid stretch of "Volcano," "Raised by Wolves" and "Cedarwood Road," but it's as solid of a three-song stretch as the band ever came up with. "Sleep Like a Baby Tonight" is one of my two favorites on the album, featuring a fascinating robotic synth part (playing solo in the beginning but eventually covered by other instruments, though it doesn't stop until near the end and reappears prominently from time to time) over which Bono sings about a pedophile priest in a way that requires him to bring out every one of his stronger aspects as a vocalist (especially in the falsetto parts), and The Edge gets in some great parts of his own, especially in the amazingly piercing parts of in the last minute or so. "This is Where You Can Reach Me" (written from the perspective a soldier whose life is no longer his own) is the band's dedication to The Clash, and this dedication seems much more apt than the band's earlier dedication to The Ramones; this one actually plausibly sounds like it could have appeared on Sandinista! or Combat Rock (or, for that matter, on War). The band sounds very much at home in fusing its own arena-protest-rock leanings with The Clash's arena-punk-reggae-rock during its latter period, and the song's five minutes seem to fly by. And finally, "The Troubles" is an incredibly eerie closer, largely thanks to the guest vocal from Swedish singer Li Lykke, but also thanks to the extremely effective and atmospheric use of a string section (the mix of of the descending Bono "You're not my troubles anymore" and the ascending string part is heavenly) and the moodiness coming out of the rhythm section (Clayton sounds like Tony Levin on a Peter Gabriel album, and I can't think of another U2 song where I'd even remotely make that comparison). Bono's singing (the lyrics, in broad strokes, are about domestic violence, but they're nebulous in the same way so many of the lyrics on The Unforgettable Fire are nebulous) is great here, The Edge asserts himself exactly as much as would be desired, and it allows the album to end on such a high note that I find myself genuinely disappointed that the album is over.

So who was U2 at this point? Was U2 the boring collection of washed-up old farts who made the glossy-but-uninspired sludge of the first half? Or was U2 a group with the potential to have one last meaningful creative surge, who could inject their previously-established style with small tweaks around the edges and who made the glossy-and-inspired material of the second half? The correct answer, of course, is both, but it's hard for me to shake the feeling that, with a more stable recording situation, the band could have squeezed out a couple more good tracks to replace a couple of the duds in the first half, and then I'd have to start thinking about the album in more positive terms than I currently do. As is, this is a very inconsistent listen, but as annoying as it is to have such a disparity between the good and the bad on an album, it makes it really easy to decide which tracks to keep around on your iPod.