Album review: Songs of Innocence by U2

I was downtown having a few drinks at Valeria’s Mexican Restaurant when I saw the news.  Some 5 years after their last release No Line on the Horizon, U2 returned with their latest album entitled Songs of Innocence (I immediately caught the William Blake reference and enthralled everyone on the streets with my acumen!).  But not only did they return, they decided to announce the new record at an Apple conference (the company, not the fruit) and immediately release the album to all Apple iTunes customers at no cost, effectively reaching half a billion people in one fell swoop.  This news pleased me like a refreshing glass of fruit punch as I consider U2 to be one of my favorite bands of all time though I was bitterly disappointed with their 2009 release and eventually concluded it to be the worst of their albums.  Still, that’s just one man’s humble opinion and I’m always ready to enthusiastically embrace new material as I would a former lover who had just put on 30 extra pounds.

I immediately went home and logged into my iTunes account, downloaded the album onto my iPod (while my iPhone was charging with the iCharger) and then rushed back to Valeria’s with my iPod and iPod iEarbuds for the virgin listen.  You see, I could not possibly stay away from Valeria’s because Alicia and Angelica were working.  Oh sweet weighty goddesses with their huge behinds, oh wonderful pleasures of the flesh, how I adore you. 

And so it was that I stared at these two women while also reflecting upon the strange circumstances that led to my own bizarre life.  The files I’d also brought to the restaurant for review and analysis were of the most confidential nature and very soon I would be deciding the ultimate fates of no less than 3 men.  This task weighed heavily on me and as I stared and reflected and considered and drank I also opened up my waxy earholes and began to listen.   

The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) – The album started off in a sheepish manner and would have put me in a piss poor mood had I not been at Valeria’s.  I’m not sure who this song is in reference to but this is yet another tune whose chorus (or maybe it’s the pre-chorus in this case) is a chant of nothing in particular (or perhaps “Whooooooooooaaaaaawhooooooaaaa” is something in the ancient Sumerian language – the oldest language known to man and which I believe was first spoken and then subsequently passed down by ancient astronauts that now abduct us from our homes and perform horrifying medical experiments on us as part of a nefarious endgame the likes of which we cannot begin to imagine) and though it is a decent chant it is also perhaps the only memorable part of the song.  This strikes a rough note with me because I hate how stupid nonsensical chants have become a norm in popular music choruses these days.  Worse yet, the production (by Danger Mouse who handles production duties on the whole thing) coupled with those chants reminds of that godawful Imagine Dragons song (take your pick).  I would rather have an opening song with no chorus at all (like Sometimes by Pearl Jam off the No Code album) than something like this.  It did manage to grow on me a bit like a viral fungus over the course of its duration and I suppose it is suitably uplifting for an opener but it was not particularly impressive. 

It was here that I flashed back briefly to a time I shared with my beloved friend Calvin Black.  A former pilot, Black was sharing with me the extensive difficulties he had in enacting a foreign based operation and chiefly noted his belief that the armed force are far too constrained by an abundance of red tape.  I remember I agreed with home wholeheartedly at the time and we proceeded to eat a delicious breakfast of Belgian waffles slathered in syrup, strawberries and topped off with a dollop of whip cream along with a side of scrambled eggs, extra crispy bacon, sourdough dry toast and a tall glass of orange juice.

Every Breaking New Wave – I think I may love this song.  It is soaring and anthemic and all those other things people love to say about their best songs.  I don’t think it quite ranks among the best because it does feel like a rehash but it is at least a highly enjoyable rehash.  Bono’s vocals soar and there is some rather interesting interplay between his singing and Edge’s guitar playing during the chorus.  It has a widescreen scope to it and seems like a successful version of the song Magnificent from their last album.  The only thing which drags it down is that it just peters out rather than moving to an appropriately righteous conclusion.    

Song for Someone – I felt familiar comfort upon hearing the lovely lilting notes which begin this song and then Bono’s voice comes in pitch perfect and the harmony actually sweetens it.  This is a great song but it’s not quite fucking great and that’s a bit of a shame!  The bridge is a tad weak and like the last track it just kind of ends rather than letting that sweet chorus swell until it makes me want to bite my own tongue off!  I must admit after the last album and the rockiness of the opening I found myself wondering if these guys still had it in them and they thankfully showed they clearly do. 

California – I am honestly sick to grisly death of songs about California.  How many does the world actually need I ask myself while throwing back 5 cups of cafe in rapid succession, each with 3 sugars and 4 creams.  This song isn’t complete horseshit, it has a nice sonic landscape I can appreciate and some tasteful bass licks but Bono’s vocals actually annoy me a bit on this one and that hurts.  I love Bono’s voice so much that when it annoys me it is like someone has made a delicious turkey on rye sandwich and then slapped me with the piece of mayonnaise drenched white bread.  Ultimately forgettable. 

Iris (Hold Me Close) – Classic sounding Edge guitar throughout this number though the Bonster is maybe holding back a little.  This is a pretty song but one that does not leaving a deep impression for some reason.  It’s definitely one worth revisiting though as I suspect it may yield some rewards on repeated listens.  If one wants to talk deep impressions they should try and track down a bootlegged copy of my boxing match with Sugar Ray Leonard in the steamy summer of 76’.  I had Ray up against the ropes and was giving him a couple to the head before taking it to the body.  I was doling out a substantial amount of punishment and then the cut on my chiseled brow which I’d sustained in the third round dripped blood into my eye and that half second of surprise was all Ray needed to lash out with his terrific right and send me sprawling across the floor.  My girlfriend at the time was a beautiful and dangerously full figured woman named Leticia who had a penchant for leopard print pants which were often stretched to the max around her mammoth thighs and gloriously lethal mountainous ass and I could hear her screaming from the front row for me to get my pathetic self up and continue the fight like I had a pair.  But I just couldn’t move.  Sugar had sent me down for the count and I lost it all that night: my money, my girlfriend, my endorsements and my dreams. 

Volcano – This starts off with a jaunty but familiar sounding bassline and I was worried we were going into another faux funk old-man rock song like Get On Your Boots (or Vertigo if it was never your thing).  Unfortunately that’s exactly what happened.  This is weak, tepid rock and I am invoking the heavens that they may cease to write these types of songs.  Or maybe they should just write a couple dozen of them to get them all out of their system and release a double disc hard rock album that I can dutifully ignore.  Honestly, I can’t figure out why a song like this fails so hard for me but a song like The Fly from Achtung Baby or Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car from Zooropa sound so great.  Volcano feels very sketchy, very incomplete.  It almost brings a tear to my eye with its basic lack of…everything.

Raised by Wolves – Similarly awful to the previous track.  Hookless, melodyless, anythingatallinterestingless.  At least those were my initial thoughts.  However after an unforgivably droning 1 minute 45 seconds the song becomes somewhat interesting when the chorus hits and Bono wails like a man on fire.  The second time around though that chorus becomes as annoying as I suspected it was.  For some reason this tune makes me think of something from Incubus’s last couple of albums.  Yes, I realize now it reminds me of their song Love Hurts from the Love Grenades album.  Good ol’ Incubus with their songs like Love Hurts and Wish You Were Here!  I wonder if on their next album they’ll have a song called Stairway to Heaven or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!?  After finishing this latest U2 collection I’m going to re-listen to every Incubus album 27 times in a row. 

It was at this venture that Alicia again walked passed and began cleaning some tables.  I thanked the cosmos for such a blissful distraction.  She had married in the previous year and was finally starting to put on the glorious comfort weight, turning her already generous and shapely figure into a voluptuous dream that made my eyes bulge and my groin throb with the power of the bass coming from the speakers of an iRadio system.  She was wearing impossibly tight black pants and every time she walked by I nearly fell out of my chair in my effort to follow the wonderful jiggle and quake of her massive buttocks.  Her smile also melted my heart and the mole next to her lip was the perfect touch that drove me loco and forced me to order repeated shots of El Capitan tequila. 

Cedarwood Road – the last couple songs left me quite emotionally drained and I wasn’t initially sure I should dare to venture on.  The guitar riffs at the beginning seemed to promise another rocker and on first listen I immediately screamed and nearly hurled the iPod across the room in horror as though it were a poison dart frog.  Fortunately it doesn’t try quite as hard to be as hip or slammin’ as the previous 2 songs but it doesn’t try at very much else either and as it ends I find it has already faded from my memory and the sinister black hole that makes up the back half of this album only grows ever larger and more ominous by the second, threatening to suck in me and anyone else unlucky enough to step in front of it. 

Sleep Like A Baby Tonight – it was with a palpable sense of dread that I let the album play on to the next track but it turns out I was allowed some reprieve here.  This song starts out with fantastic atmosphere provided by the haunting and steady electronic pulse and Bono’s affected voice.  The band – suddenly and perhaps inexplicably remembering they once made beautiful, unique music – kicks it into high gear about a minute in and that also sounds shockingly great.  Bono’s vocals on the bridge sound oddly under produced and I haven’t decided how I feel about that yet given the album’s overall heavy-handed production and because the high notes do not come quite as smooth to him as before.  The chorus is quite memorable and I may call this tune a highlight of the album though that is admittedly low praise at this point. 

Angelica was kind enough to bring me more food and drink then, eyeing me with barely disguised sympathy.  She was no less an example of poetry in motion as her co-worker.  Similarly sturdily built, she opted for a skirt instead of pants and complimented this by wearing nude colored pantyhose and black high heels.  As she served me more rich portions of food I could not help but make the correlation between all the delicious mouthwatering meat and cheese stuffed into the enchiladas before me and all the glorious meat crammed into the hosiery and straining the heels on those deliriously lucky shoes.  Her coal black hair trailed down her back down to her enormous derriere and I longed for both of these goddesses to tell me what an ugly and pathetic loser I really am, to force me into submission and laugh at my inadequacies!

This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now – No sooner do they turn things around that they decide to bring it back with another face meltingly terrible midtempo rocker.  Something about a “soldier, soldier” and generic harmonized vocals and chants which eliminate any chance of interesting dynamics in this already nonexistent melody (this talk style of singing sounds more like a guide vocal than anything else.  Seriously, what the fucking fuck has happened to these guys?!  How is this even fucking possible?!).  This is the second longest song on the album and I can’t imagine what made them think this was one of the ones most deserving of a protracted running time. 

The Troubles (featuring Lykke Li): Yeah guys, the real troubles began when you started writing this stinker of an album, hahahaha.  Good thing you gave it away for free.  Typical calm, center of the storm we write about important stuff U2 closer.  Meh, not bad, I was mostly thankful to just finally be done with the fucking thing.  Lykke Li sounds more interesting in the chorus here than Bono (or anyone else in the band) did for most of the album.  But the main melody is very reminiscent of Duran Duran song Come Undone and/or The Smashing Pumpkins song Mayonaise which makes me angry because those are both far better songs.  But fuck, at least they bothered to include a melody in this one!  That must have been Li’s doing and they probably fought her the whole way on it. 

The album ended, I ordered another drink and started the whole thing over again, needing to rid myself of the trickiness of first impressions.  The second listen was slightly better but that was largely because my nerves were no longer in such a state of shock and the tequila had calmed my restless spirit.  The songs I thought I liked seemed less appealing the second time around but I think that was the eyeball gouging disappointment of the album as a whole rubbing off on the few bright spots.  The restaurant was closing so I plunked down a large stack of bills and stumbled out, mumbling some feverish goodbyes.  I took one last long back at these weighty beauties with their wonderful dark skin, hair black as night and tremendous jiggling rumps and stepped out into the world.  I stumbled through the alleys and passed by bums who smelled like shit and piss and one who had some kind of growth the size of a half-dollar on his lower lip.  I considered ending their misery but knew this would be nothing more than a panacea for the pain of my own failed existence and opted instead to pass out alongside them.  Sleeping in trash and shit with rodents and cockroaches crawling on me, I finally felt at home.  U2 had ruined my evening. 

It’s hard to summarize my thoughts when they are almost all so very negative.  I don’t know if this is more Danger Mouse or U2’s wishes or likely some ghastly hybrid of the two but there is a strong indie hipster pop vibe throughout A LOT of this work that sounds so cheap and calculated and actually embarrassing for a band of U2’s age and stature.  However this does neatly align with this release’s overall lack of hook or anything in the way of interesting melodies.  I dare say this is probably the weakest set of melodies Bono has put together for his vocals.  I don’t want to speculate on diminished technical ability but there surely must be a more graceful way for his singing to age.  It also seems The Edge did not feel there was any need to write any remotely interesting guitar parts for this album and just plays riffs which are interchangeable with almost anybody.  Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. all but disappear.  Song structure is depressingly predicable and I wish some experimentation would show up somewhere.  The quick ends became something of a sloppy theme of the album, a signature component of the record’s sound – though maybe I should be thankful that most of these songs did not last too long!  I still can’t believe I’m saying things like this about a U2 album! 

But damnit, statements like the ones I made above are unfair!  I know these guys are not slackers, content to rest on their laurels.  I know they sweat each album and that their music is a pure spiritual release for them (at least I think I know this) and they have made some of the most amazing music imaginable.  I know I will listen to this album many more times in an attempt at discovery and trying to unlock something here I can connect with but I would love to know what the group was thinking/feeling when they wrote these songs and understand their perception of the music presented here.  I would have no trouble right now calling this U2’s worst album and I would have a lot of trouble trying to recommend it to someone.  Bono has mentioned that a follow-up album titled Songs of Experience should be ready shortly and I honestly don’t know whether I should be relieved or horrified. 

I’m very curious what the critical consensus will be though I’m sure that if he hasn’t already David Fricke of Rolling Stone will give this one another perfect score.   Fuck, I bet he’ll give it 10 out of 5 stars and say it’s better than War, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Zooropa, Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree put together.  He’ll probably conclude by saying it’s the best album ever recorded! 

I’ll say some positive things now.  They are whizzes at marketing and it was super canny to launch this with the iPhone 6 as the amount of publicity they are receiving is staggering.   Much of the music sounds like it was designed for stadiums (though there is not a single song I would really want to hear live, even the ones I do like have been done before and much better) and this is likely all grand promotion for an imminent world tour announcement where they can rake in even more money, moulah, dough, greenbacks, pesos, bread, coin, bank, dead presidents, cabbage.  But how I yearn in my heart of hearts for the days of yore when U2 would put out an album as an artistic statement and not as simple marketing and concert prologue.   However there have been songs and albums which did not click with me or make complete sense until I saw their live renditions so I am hopeful something like that will happen here.  And even with two dud albums (or ten!  Or 100!) I would still say I love you too U2 and I will try my level best to see them live when next they tour.   I will also need more listens to get a grasp on the lyrics. Aside from a couple lines that were overly saccharine or old hat nothing stood out as particularly poor nor was there much I can point to as immediately grabbing me.  Finally, I would like to add that I did not like Achtung Baby when I first bought back in the great fall of 91’.  So there is still a glimmer of hope here, that’s gotta count for something! 

I’ll even end on the most positive note of all and say I think I’ll go give 2009’s No Line on the Horizon another listen because it seems pretty great right now!