U2 still has two nights to go as Letterman's house band

 

It’s always a telltale sign on any U2 release if the band’s guitarist, Dave “The Edge” Evans, is on target. Such was the case in “Achtung Baby!” with its soaring, chiming solos for Bono to build and broad upon. With so much focus on U2’s humanitarian-activist singer, it gets lost sometimes that U2 would be nothing if the music first is not out front, with the band’s majestic rhythms and those scorching leads by the Edge as the main event.

 

Such is the case on “No Line on the Horizon.” And it’s probably due to the influence of recording some of the album within the heady environs of Morocco, with its legacies music of capable of producing trance-inducing depths, as well as working with Brian Eno, who joined on with the collaborative corporate during the band’s important developmental years of the mid-1980s, with such albums as “Unforgettable Fire,” “Joshua Tree,” which is arguably one of the top 10 albums of all time, and “Achtung Baby,” indisputably one of the Edgiest, that this update for the band’s three musical members -- the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullins Jr -- is so key. Maybe it’s just because Eno listens to and loves working with the Edge more, and simply gets on more with drummers, always finding ways to cook up his riffs into his densely mixed, organic polyrhythms and multi-voiced choruses exploring the minor ranges to create a deep sense of tragedy and immediacy.

 

What you end up with is a rich collection of anthemic tunes coming from a wide range of approaches in sound, with Bono filling in for the catchy blasts of commentary that’s constantly trying to catch up, and the band making the earthquake music with wings of silver for his global Celticness to float upon, just a response to the call of the Edge’s chiming away in airy chords into U2 space, which in this case has managed to capture the energy of the age … kind of U2’s specialty. Indeed, Bono is really challenged by the rest of the band on this one, and the nice thing about it … he answers the call.

 

Carlos Santana once said he could always tell who was playing guitar by the instant sound of that one first note’s tone. But unlike Neil Young, the Edge has never been such a showboat to simply hang out and jam with scores and scores of leads, his keen mind no doubt requiring the structure in the purest arcs he can make. But such tunes as “The Fez-Being Born” and “Magnificent” live and breathe on the whole band’s ability to create space, most of that area discovered by the Edge's drilling leads.

 

Though over the years U2 has learned to make the music earphone-candy worthy, the responsibility to be a world-class rock band, and transformative one at that, nevertheless create the need to build structures airy and broad as say, Pink Floyd or even, in Bono’s case, the Doors at their best, to be heard through big box speakers. The danger being, of course, with so much technology at one’s disposal, the band might end up sounding a bit like Yes. But still, it all requires huge, huge arena sound, where the entire audience can feel and feel the participatory ecstacies of the song, and on this document, “No Line on the Horizon” one not only finds hope, with messages of planetary love in times of great poverty and war, but a masterpiece of catchy compaction and power that great rock’n’roll is always built upon.

 

 

-- Douglas McDaniel