U2 - No Line on the Horizon

At the essence of everything is a battle between the old and the new. It’s the pull in politics between conservative and liberal, the chasms between generations, the kernel of natural selection. In any undertaking in the choice between doing what everyone else does because it’s known to work, or risking a change in the recipe that could mean failure or could mean setting the new standard. In music it’s obvious, a jumble of dissonant noises in one decade is rock n’ roll in the next, and the stale classic you’re tired of hearing shortly after that.

The awesome science show RadioLab tells the story of a guy who traveled backwards through time, as far as tolerance of musical complexity goes. The guy was archiving music for a classical music radio station, starting with modern music and going into the past, listening as he went for months, all the way back to Dark Age Gregorian chants. So one day he leaves his archives and hears what the station is playing, and it’s awful, he’s wondering, what is this crap? And it was Bach. They get into the theory science has to explain how this all works: in the auditory cortex of your brain are neurons in charge of making sense of the sounds you hear. When you hear something really new and different, your neurons can’t make sense of it and tell you to get upset. But those neurons are brilliant, as you become more exposed to the odd sounds, they figure them out, and soon enough the sounds aren’t so odd and you’re able to enjoy them. Your clever brain shares its puzzle-solving joy with the rest of you. And soon enough those neurons need a new challenge, and will tell you to be bored if you hear the same song too often.

Whenever I’ve seen a show with vampires or highlanders or any sort of immortals in it, I’ve wondered if they’d really be like that. Usually immortals are shown as keeping with the times, thoroughly modern creatures. But anyone who’s met an old person knows, the rest of us don’t work that way. Not to badmouth older people, but generational changes in all fields of thought, especially music, often simply leave them behind. For immortals to work like in movies, they’d need to be caught in a perpetual slipstream of youth culture, and to have stood on the correct side of history through all its twists. It seems more like real people conjure a worldview in their formative years and mostly stick to it, seeing everything that follows through their established framework. Say you were a royalist in the French Revolution, you’d probably still be complaining about how everything wrong in the world resembles your gripes with that event. How many times could you reassimilate with what the culture now finds acceptable? I think actual immortals might act like the Amish.

U2 is like the immortals of fiction. The band walks on, from the time of legends on into our musical future, deathless. They’ve changed with us, early 80’s U2 doesn’t sound like late 80’s U2, 90’s U2 doesn’t sound like U2 today. They’ve adapted and they’ve survived. The scary part is, with this newest album, they’ve even gotten ahead of us. And scarier still, they know exactly what they’re doing. What I’ve written here, everything I’ve said about music and adaptation, this is what No Line on the Horizon is about.

Now, I’m a huge U2 fan; in 12 albums they’ve produced less than ten tracks I wouldn’t love listening to this moment. It’s also true that, like a lot of correct people, I vastly prefer old U2. The songs on this new album belong to two camps: songs that sound sorta like old U2 songs, and songs where they tried new things. On early impression, the familiar sounds succeed and the experiments range from rock rock on to bizarre to just kind of weak.

Of the songs that win on first impression:

The title track uses their old trick of speaking about a subject as if it was a woman, resulting in provocative lyrics. Singing about music, Bono says, “I know a girl who’s like the sea / I watch her changing every day for me”, and “You can hear the universe in her sea shells”. There are mentions of infinity and time being irrelevant, and of course that’s the nature of the mind’s progression through music, as we can pass from classical to Dark Age chants to something yet unheard. The title is about the band’s evolving sound, the desire to move so far and fast into the future that the horizon becomes unrecognizable.

“Magnificent” lives up to its name, and “Moment of Surrender” is a song I liked on first listen and wanted to hear again; It would make a good single if it wasn’t more than seven minutes long. Both sound like the old U2 recipe freshly baked.

The tradition Irish sounds of “White as Snow” could belong to October-era U2. Standing out on this album for its softness, it’s a moving lullaby keeping rough company.

“Cedars of Lebanon” is turbo cool, like towards the end of Achtung Baby cool. The setting and the character of a reporter in self-exile are the most vividly invoked of any song here. The whispering away of the music just before the final line ends the album perfectly.

Of the songs in new styles:

“Stand Up Comedy” is the best of the experiments. U2 sounds like some hard rocking 70’s band.

“FEZ-Being Born” is a monster escaped from Brian Eno’s laboratory, ambient and deliberate, very produced - in a good way. The sound is like if it were possible to sing and play instruments while underwater, or more fitting the title, while swimming through amniotic fluid, a voice from within a womb.

“Unknown Caller” begins with nearly two minutes of pleasant ambience, the beautiful high guitar sound of old U2 and the lyric “Sunshine… Sunshine…” suggesting a dawn landscape. Then it becomes an oddly themed self-help song, with sections of monotone cheerleading chants stating weird computeresque commands like “Force quit and move to trash”, and “Reboot yourself”. It’s not so clever or easy to like as it needs to be.

“Breathe” is the weirdest song available here. Lyrics burst out in a stream, “16th of June, nine-0-five, door bell rings, Man at the door says if I want to stay alive a bit longer, There’s three things I need you to know, three! Coming from a long line of travelling sales people on my mother’s side I wasn’t gonna buy just anyone’s cockatoo, So why would I invite a complete stranger into my home, Would you?” It’s a bit embarrassing on the first listen. Just before the second listen, I found myself eager to hear it again. It’s very different, intriguing.

“Get on Your Boots” is the album’s first single, and seems tailored for that job by its length and bubblegum sensibility, its own radio edit. It sounds like it wants to take charge. The problem is, it’s the least immediately likeable song here, and it’s not really about anything, it’s hard to see the point. As a back of the album experiment it becomes interesting; as single it’s a huge mistake. The song’s line that wants to be an anthem, “Let me in the sound”, might be a great lyric if it sounded more urgent and made more sense, maybe if it was just shouted once? Instead it’s repeated in a way that becomes droning, and when the lyric tries to avoid boredom by becoming “Let me in the sound sound”, it just sounds dumb.

The flagship song is “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”, not because it’s the best song, but because it delivers the album’s theme, holding the whole crazy thing together, letting it be heard differently. As the title makes clear, U2 showed up ready to do something crazy. The central statement of the album is this lyric, “The sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard”. U2 knows that “Change of heart comes slow”, but it’s time to try making music that does something new, and they aren’t afraid to make a mess. They soon follow this with “The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear”, and since they’re asking so humbly for us to forgive their missteps, of course we will.

On first impression, the older style songs are easily more enjoyable. But something happens on repeated listens, those auditory neurons catch up; the familiar songs become unexciting, and the newer styles are the ones I’m hyped to hear again. After awhile even “Get on Your Boots” becomes likeable. Whether that’s a testament to the adaptive powers of the mind, or proves the crazy bits of this album are simply ahead of their time, we’ll have to see.