(Courtesy of Interscope Records.)
For most bands, if they’re famous enough, there is some form of critical consensus to be reached. The internet may allow any idiot with a laptop (hello there!) to share his opinion on the latest Kings of Leon album, but it also means everyone who’s writing those reviews has already read what Pitchfork and Rolling Stone and the NME have written about the same subject. Rightly or wrongly, most critics seem to operate from a common understanding of a band’s backstory.
This consensus effect becomes more magnified and transparent with a band of U2’s stature, both because of the bumper-crop of reviews that will be written about them and because of their longevity as a commercial force. And so, for U2, it’s become almost inevitable to have 1997’s Pop derided as an experimental mess, 2001’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind classified as “back to basics” and 2004’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb termed a “return to roots”. Of course, as a band who’s navigated their way through the musical trends of three decades of rock, U2 has always been aware of this tendency, and to some extent they’ve been able to guide the process through carefully controlled hype and pre-release information. On No Line on the Horizon, they’ve been billing it as a ground-breaking, experimental effort, perhaps aware that most perceived How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb as U2 playing it safe.
Certain circumstances lend credence to this. U2 began recording in Morocco with their old production team of Eno and Lanois after scrapping sessions with Rick Rubin. But those expecting some exciting fusion of Afro-beat world-pop and The Edge’s shimmery guitar work should look elsewhere… especially for the exciting part.
Lead single “Get On Your Boots” is an absolute car crash of bad ideas, from the generic “hard” rock riff that underpins the whole thing, through the baffling non-sequiturs Bono delivers in his best Dylan/Costello homage in the verses, on to the atrocious “let me in the sound” bit with the hip-hop drums. It was bad enough hearing it in isolation, but its placement in the album is even more distressing given that it sounds like nothing else on No Line on the Horizon.
Thankfully though, this means there’s nothing else as blatantly awful as “Get On Your Boots” (though “Stand Up Comedy” does itself no favors with its attempt to bring some funk to the proceedings). The main problem with the album is its overwhelming blandness. The first six or seven listens to this thing just washed over me and while I could appreciate individual moments (the wordless chorus of “Unknown Caller”, the delicate piano bits in “Magnificent”), nothing really makes you want to come back for another listen. I can throw some praise behind the closing “Cedars of Lebanon” which, as a spoken-word piece where Bono assumes the mantle of a weary wartime journalist, actually benefits from its pretensions but then again, when I’m calling a song that’s basically a glorified monologue a highlight, I suppose that’s a problem in and of itself.
In a sense, No Line on the Horizon might be the exact opposite of what it was hyped to be. It’s probably the least ground-breaking or experimental album U2 have ever released.
