One of the biggest surprises, at least to me, of this year’s “Let’s bedazzle everyone with our new stuff” Apple event was the announcement that U2’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, would be automatically downloaded to everyone’s iTunes for free (minus, btw, as many as four bonus songs, three of which will likely be on the actual paid download/Cd and one more to be included on the vinyl release).
While I feel that U2 hit their pinnacle with the dual releases of 1991’s Achtung Baby and 1993’s Zooropa, to me they crashed down hard with the release of 1997’s Pop (an album that totally did not work for me) and have never fully recovered from it. Though they’ve had some good songs and even decent full albums since that time (they’ve released 4 albums since Pop, including Songs of Innocence), the proverbial “something” was missing from their work.
Though its hard to put my finger on what that “something” is, it seemed they were perhaps trying to hard to create “hits” while simultaneously playing it far too safe. Instead of a rock band, they became a corporation and were no longer willing to make waves or issue political proclamations or create songs that cut deep. In sum, they got rather…boring.
Still, I loved most of their stuff up to Zooropa so naturally I’m interested in hearing anything they choose to release. When I learned Songs of Innocence was being given away, I immediately jumped onto my iTunes and, not finding it there, manually downloaded the album and, to this point, have listened to the first three songs. I really enjoyed the second song, “Every Breaking Wave”, but until I hear the whole thing a few times, I’m going to withhold any other critical comments.
That didn’t stop others from doing the same, though.
I was particularly intrigued with Lindsay Zoladz’s review of the album for Slate magazine, which you can find here:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/09/10/u2-s-surprise-album-songs-of-innocence-reviewed.html
The review was fascinating in its ambivalence, noting the positives and the negatives of this, the 2014 edition of U2.
Over at Salon, I found an even more startling article by Prachi Gupta which, rather than review the album itself, goes into people’s reactions to suddenly finding a new U2 album in their iTunes que. Most of the comments presented aren’t positive at all, and point to a fact that until I read the article didn’t realize but probably should have: To young music listeners, U2 is very much a band from the past. To them, having this album “forced” upon them when they didn’t ask for it is impolite at best and somewhat creepy at worse (which Lindsay Zoladz points to as well!).
Regardless, this makes for interesting reading, even if Ms. Gupta shows her ignorance of the band by referring in the very first sentence of the article that U2 is a “90s rock band”. I suppose their initial rise to prominence in 1980-81 and subsequent great albums from the 1980’s doesn’t count!?
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/10/this-new-u2-album-has-got-everyone-feeling-lots-of-feelings/