U2
With the notable exceptions of Pop and Zooropa, U2 have created steady outputs of straight-up rock music for over two decades. What is perhaps most compelling about this phenomenon is that on each album, the music sounds startlingly refreshing, even when it is clearly the work of arguably the world’s biggest supergroup.
2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is no different. It is unquestionably U2 doing what U2 does best – making passionate, stadium-friendly rock, with nuances that are unique only to each of their specific albums. On Atomic Bomb, Bono and Co. showcase Bono’s emotive vocals and the Edge’s unmistakable guitar work to great effect, producing a record that manages to both excite the listener, and serve as evidence of the band’s growing maturity.
Atomic Bomb is alternately contemplative and manically energizing – the omnipresent “Vertigo” single (which lost none of its charm even through the tiresome World Series iPod commercials) seems to have been designed specifically for the maximum amount of concert-goers fist-pumping and chorus-chanting, while “One Step Closer to Knowing” (a title that was derived from a conversation Bono had with Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher) is particularly touching in the light of Bono’s father’s death in 2001. Instead of writing this song entirely as a first-person narration of pain, “One Step” features reflective lyrics that are universal in their application (e.g., “the heart that hurts / is the heart that beats”).
Although, Bono certainly has not lost his taste for the personally contemplative – on the beautifully uplifting “City of Blinding Light,” he ponders, “What happened to the beauty inside of me?,” while talk of his own place “in the mysterious distance/between a man and a woman” is the subject of the gently rhythmic “Man and a Woman.”
Regardless of how inclusive Bono’s lyrics are, the man himself is at the top of his game, along with the rest of his bandmates. Atomic Bomb is perhaps the most refreshing and candid release from a band that has spent the past twenty years trying to get to this point on their musical journey.
-- JN 01/15/05 |
