Label: Interscope
Sound/Style: Electronically informed, forward-thinking rock big on atmosphere
On their first album in more than four years, U2 both accommodate and confound expectations. The quartet has been using that one-two punch ever since completing the seven-year arc that took them from idealistic, self-styled upstarts in 1980 to international superstardom with 1987’s The Joshua Tree. The organic progression of their hard-driving yet atmospheric sound peaked with that landmark album, which featured the production team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Eno, one of the most innovative thinkers to touch the worlds of contemporary art and music in the last thirty years, has played an integral role in shaping the band’s sound and informing its evolution. The presence of Eno and Lanois has been as much felt as heard in the aesthetic choices and objective detachment they’ve provided for the band. No Line on the Horizon marks a first in that it features Eno and Lanois serving as producers as well as co-composers along with the band on the majority of the disc’s 11 tracks.
The creative process undertaken by the six-man collective is not unlike that of alchemy. Fiercely played bass-and-drum constructions, guitar riffs and vocalist Bono’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics are filtered through intuitive as well as highly technical processes, all with the end goal of creating a palpable but transformative sense of space and emotion. The undulating title track wields a flesh-and-blood throb but is swathed in a hypnotic, computer-processed whirl, while a tumbling, near-arrhythmic electronic figure repeats throughout the soulful seven-and-a-half-minute lament “Moment of Surrender.”
While such tracks perhaps rely too heavily on process and manipulation to qualify as rock and roll in the most basic sense, they succeed at fusing rock’s analog past and digital present, creating a sonic analogy for the struggle of humankind against the dehumanizing effects of technology. In “Surrender,” a character has an epiphany while standing at an automatic teller machine, verifying that he is more than a mere sequence of impulses. On “Unknown Caller,” a cellphone speaks commands to its holder, whose separation from self, if not sanity, is suggested in the darkly comic line “I had driven to the scene of the accident/ And I sat there waiting for me.” (“You know your name/ So punch it in/ Hear me/ Cease to speak that I may speak/ Shush now/ Oh, Oh/ Don’t move or say a thing…”)
The band’s well-known spiritual side informs numerous tracks, most notably “White as Snow” and “Magnificent.” The former provides a calming contrast to the dense textures that pervade elsewhere, while the unadorned vocal evokes a fitting sense of purity. (“Once I knew there was a love divine/ Then came a time I thought it knew me not/ Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not?/ Only the lamb as white as snow.”)
With lines like “I was born to sing for you,” “Magnificent” offers an exultant act of worship, though its searing, minor-key pulse and yearning lyric underscore estrangement from the Creator. (“…Only love, only love can heal such a scar/ Justified ‘til we die/ You and I will magnify/ The Magnificent/ Magnificent.”) But ultimately, alienation—whether from God, self or others—proves a recurring theme on No Line on the Horizon, a work which seems as deliberate in its contradictions as in its artistic attempt to reconcile them.
Audio Clips
"Magnificent"
"Moment of Surrender"
"No Line on the Horizon"
"Unknown Caller"
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