U2 - No Line On The Horizon

Formed way back in 1976, U2 has come a long, long way from being the premier post-punk rockers to the ambassadors of much more than an era of rock stars gone by. And amidst all the hype and the glory, they’re at a position where, much like Elton John, Bono and the Edge can assume that whatever they do, their commercial viability, in a market now dominated by bands that are throwbacks to another century, shall stand the test of time. So, what do you do when your commercial success has been so consistent for so long that you know for a fact there’s no end to it? The answer, to any artiste with an iota of integrity is – whatever-the-hell-you-want! But as U2 found out with the 1997 release, Pop, probably their bravest album in the last two decades, it doesn’t quite work that way.

It’s been four years since the grand old men of whatever’s left of rock’n’roll released ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’, and it has been more of the same old tried, tested and approved for MTV music that U2 has been putting out for a long time now. Don’t get me wrong, these albums (‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’, ‘…Atomic Bomb’) had very nice songs played very, very well. But the excitement value that tagged along with an ‘Achtung Baby’ was lost and buried under heaps of iPods hopping to ‘Uno, dos, tres, catorce’. And with ‘Beautiful Day’ being relegated to the background music of sports car commercials, the quartet were fast becoming the U2 we know – a band that was being written off as dinosaurs.

But the thing is, and here’s the catch22 – had U2 spent their last decade doing what they did, only adding a little bit of silly to it, and coming out with something a little less mainstream radio friendly, they’d probably be just as big as they are right now.

‘No Line On The Horizon’ comes to us as a brave record, more on the lines of ‘Pop’, than ‘Zooropa’, sadly; but it is a brave album that we all welcome since it shows us that Messrs Bono, The Edge, Clayton and Mullen still have it in them to be relevant and contemporary as they march into their fourth decade as the ‘biggest band in the world’.

Diving into the album, the best track off it, at first listen is the sparse ‘Moment of Surrender’, built around Bono’s low growl and Adam Clayton’s stirring bass-line. It’s as if the song knows what you want it to do, and does just that, exactly when you want it to. A similar feeling rushes through you when you’re at ‘Cedars of Lebanon’.

But this is about where I stop marveling at the album, and start noticing the mediocrity, by U2 standards. The band must’ve worked really hard at the title track on the album, for it takes effort far beyond one man to come up with a song more irritating than Vertigo. The band tries to punch above its weight here, and in doing so, sound like a band half their age; which, for Bono and his band of messiahs, isn’t really very befitting.

Another thing grossly amiss on this album is the lyrical content. I remember listening to ‘The Joshua Tree’ a couple of months ago, and once again going, ‘Damn, I wish I could write like that.’ But on ‘No Line…’,Bono’s lyrics come off as uninspired, even boring to an extent. The seemingly boundless imagination that Bono had to his disposal on previous albums seems to have taken a walk along the horizon, because with lyrics like ‘Child drinking dirty water from the river bank/Soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank’, on a song about war, his trademark subtlety isn’t really holding the fort down. The comedy is complete when you go on to ‘Unknown Caller’, where Bono asks you to ‘Force quit, move to trash. Restart and reboot yourself.’

The rest of the album is replete with mid-paced rockers from another time that will struggle to fit anywhere in the listeners memory, except for sounding vaguely familiar and hit you with a déjà vu. The album is U2 all the way; atleast the U2 that most of us know and love and hate. The album will garner an average response, but an average response for a U2 album is generally mind-boggling figures in relation to an average band. It is, like I said before about the band, a collection of very nice songs, played very well. A little more inspiration, Mr. Hewson, and we’ll be back to the grandstands, singing ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’.

I remember reading a statement somewhere, about when U2 came out with ‘Achtung Baby’.
“It’s a con! It’s a con. It’s just a way of putting people off from the fact that it’s a heavy mother. It’s probably our most serious record - and yet it’s got the least serious title. … They all thought we were, you know, we’d lightened up. Which is totally untrue. We’re miserable bastards.”

Too bad they moved on to more serious titles.