One! Two! Three! Fourteen!
I am getting ready to leave the ground.
I procured the latest offering from that little band from Ireland otherwise known as U2 last week. Immediately, I threw myself into it just as fast as I could throw it into my CD player. And yet, to my surprise, I did not love it after one listen. Somehow I had forgotten rule number one of listening to a new U2 album: leave any previous notions of their style on the cliff, and freefall into their new one.
Once I did, I left All That You Can’t Leave Behind behind with the Joshua trees and achtung babies on the ledge. I realized that there is no fathomable way that someone could get all the intensity, complexity, and sheer sonic glory that is How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb after listening to it once.
In fact, it is like sitting in on a calculus class as a six-year-old. You comprehend that the equations on the board are supposed to be meaningful, but the jumbled mess of lines and letters is so complex that frustration sets in and you assume in ignorance that it is, for lack of a better term, bad. The truth is that you do not know enough about it to grasp its profound nature.
However, when you least expect it, this album blows you away. It has to get under your skin first, and then you hear the bells in “City of Blinding Lights,” or the jubilant laugh in “Original of the Species” as lead singer Bono extols his love: “You are the first one of your kind/Everywhere you go you shout it/You don’t have to be shy about it.” These moments remind you that, despite the tendency of the day, there does not have to be an “average” song on an album. This quality explains U2’s continual relevance and freshness despite their presence on the music scene since the early 1980s.
Guitarist Edge takes an assertive role on the record in sharp contrast to the more minimalist one he holds on the past few albums. Indeed, crunchy, omnipresent single “Vertigo” spins you back to the early days when all that mattered was “three chords and the truth.” The catchily syncopated “Love and Peace or Else” boasts a complex ending riff that stands as a not-so-discrete reaffirmation that he is one of rock’s greatest guitarists.In another exercise of his increased role, the Edge even takes lead vocals from Bono for a verse of the uplifting “Miracle Drug,” a stirring reflection about an old schoolmate of the band.
The work closes fittingly with “Yahweh,” a beautifully composed vision of those inexplicably spiritual moments where you are suddenly aware of so much more than yourself. You are caught off guard by the brilliance as “the sun is coming up on the ocean,” layered between a driving beat and ringing notes that seem to glisten off the surface of the rippling water.
And as Bono cries out, “take this soul, and make it sing”- you want to too.