Listening to the taut guitar line and disco drums you can just about hear what he means, but the song feels pallid and tentative, the work of a band who have had the wind knocked out of them.
Bono has claimed that Where You Can Reach Me Now is influenced by the Clash’s disco experiments on Sandinista!. You might detect a certain whiff of desperation in the fact that parts of the album sound distinctly like Coldplay – literally the first thing you hear is the kind of massed woah-oh vocals with which Chris Martin reliably rouses the world’s stadiums, while the guitar line on Every Breaking Wave carries an echo of Paradise’s melody – or, even more startling, Emile Sandé, whose Read All About It seems to have informed the tune of Song for Someone. Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton hints at dance dabbling of the kind U2 indulged in on 1997’s Pop Declan Gaffney worked on the experimental No Line on the Horizon Paul Epworth – who graduated from hip indie producer to chart blockbuster by way of Adele’s 21 – and Beyoncé collaborator Ryan Tedder suggest a lunge for vast commercial success and fans of classic U2 might be reassured that Flood’s name first appeared in the credits of The Joshua Tree.
It took years to make, involving five different producers, who between them seem to have covered every base.
U2 songs of innocence how to#
So record-breaking tours and hit singles have been interspersed with albums that band members openly criticised – Bono would subsequently claim that 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb “fucking annoys me” – and commercially underperformed, or at least commercially underperformed by U2 standards: the worldwide sales of 2009’s No Line on the Horizon slumped to a meagre 5m copies.įor all the grandiosity of its launch and Blakean title – and indeed for all the talk of it as a concept album based on the band’s Dublin childhoods – Songs of Innocence is audibly a product of that confusion. Having deconstructed their sound and image to vast success in the 90s, U2 have spent much of the intervening period looking like they can’t find the instructions to put themselves back together again. Indeed, your attitude to the album’s arrival on your computer might depend on your attitude to U2, or at least the U2 of the past 10 years, a troubled and confused period in the band’s history.
Whether this amounts to an act of great munificence, or the musical equivalent of a unsolicited email offering safe and fast penis enlargement, is a moot point: a cynical voice might read Bono waxing lyrical on U2’s website about the album winging its way unbidden to Africa and east Asia and suggest that Songs of Innocence amounts to payback for all those spam messages from Barrister Joseph Obagana and Mr Wong Du, South Korean banker, concerning million-dollar inheritances. U2 and Apple – the latter footing the bill – don’t seem to have released the album so much as foisted it upon half-a-billion people: if you have an iTunes account, it is there in your “purchased” folder. It was announced, minutes before its release, at Apple’s Keynote Presentations: Bono and the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, indulging in some scripted “hey-why-don’t-we-do-the-show-right-here” banter so teeth-gritting it seems a miracle no one in the audience of assembled geeks tried to bludgeon themselves into insensibility with an iPad before its end.
U2 songs of innocence for free#
E ven in an age in which we’ve grown accustomed to artists giving away their albums for free or suddenly unleashing them without warning, the arrival of U2’s Songs of Innocence feels slightly curious.