Review

How old-fashioned is this? It’s a collection of songs that considers itself an album, that demands to be loved and to be listened to in sequence, that wants to ring out the tone of the age. No Line On The Horizon was put together in the dog days of the Bush presidency and finalised when Obama was fixing to take on a job of work. Both parties are intent on finding deliverance, on cutting through moral vacancy and getting engaged with this weary old place.

U2 have spent 18 months with this mission, looking for an alternative to a society of fragments, tweets and doublespeak. The songs introduce characters who wander forlornly. In the distance, there are wars, drugs and decay. But still Bono wants to contest all this. He wants to steer us towards the rapture, to muster up a declarative roar.

The last album (How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, 2004) was a little polite, so maybe that explains the new urgency on this one – the need to lash out the riffs, to fatten up the bass and to command the listener’s time. So they open with the title track and a sense of U2 in that mid-period ascent – willing us towards optimism and consciously gearing the music for that effect. It shudders and hesitates, but ultimately, it flies.

On ‘Magnificent’ the singer is ecstatic and roaring like a Biblical Psalmist – the kind of notion he tried back on the October album but didn’t have the creative chops to carry off. Now it sounds like a cinch, and you wonder just how the album can hold after such an opening. He follows with ‘Moment Of Surrender’ as the vocals waver like John Lennon and the beats grow fuzzy. Again, the voice at the heart of it is royally lost: “I was speeding on the subway through the stations of the cross”.

Happily then, the lumpen first single ‘Get On Your Boots’ was not representative of the new scheme. Fair enough, they wanted a radio-friendly opener, something to show they could still deliver the boogie. But even that approach is outvoted later in the record by ‘Stand Up Comedy’, which lays on the Zeppelin rumble and pitches choruses on top of choruses. This sounds like an album that took a long while to finish. Nothing is underachieved. All is bristling and tooled up.

Sometimes it feels too busy and the middle of the record doesn’t reveal so much of itself on early listens. There’s certainly a welcome breather with ‘White As Snow’, a story that gets intimate in your ear, not unlike the lonesome voices of Springsteen’s Nebraska. That manner is reprised at the end with ‘Cedars Of Lebanon’ as a journalist busies himself with affairs in the Middle East.

There are funny parts when Bono mocks his own status as the little guy with the absurd role. Meantime, feelings of disarray are considered on ‘Unknown Caller’ as technology throws a glitch and the singer gets lost in the neon night. The thread continues later with ‘Breathe’ as the resolve is rediscovered and the band grind into affirmative mode.

There will be no other record like it this year. There’s nothing on this scale, no other act that wants to grandstand globally. They see a prevailing grey out there, an indistinct smudge between the earth and the heavens. That’s not enough for U2, of course. They want to walk that line. Stuart Bailie

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DOWNLOAD: ‘MAGNIFICENT’, ‘NO LINE ON THE HORIZON’, ‘CEDARS OF LEBANON’.
FOR FANS OF: LED ZEPPELIN II, THE JOSHUA TREE, JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND.

Posted on: March 4, 2009