Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| U2 | All That You Can't Leave Behind | <p>Nearly ten years after beginning U2 Mach II with their brilliant seventh album Achtung Baby, U2 ease into their third phase with 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind. The title signifies more than it seems, since the group sifts through its past, working with Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, all in an effort to construct a classicist U2 album. Thankfully, it's a rock record from a band that absorbed all the elastic experimentation, studio trickery, dance flirtations, and genre bending of Achtung, Zooropa, and Pop — all they've shed is the irony. U2 choose not to delve as darkly personal as they did on Achtung or Zooropa, yet they also avoid the alienating archness of Pop, returning to the generous spirit that flowed through their best '80s records. On that level, All may be reminiscent of The Joshua Tree, but this is a clever and craftsmanlike record, filled with nifty twists in the arrangements, small sonic details, and colors. U2 take subtle risks, such as their best pure pop song ever with "Wild Honey"; they're so self-confident they effortlessly write their best anthem in years with "Beautiful Day"; they offer the gospel-influenced "Stuck in a Moment," never once lowering it to the shtick it would have been on Rattle and Hum. Like any work from craftsmen, All That You Can't Leave Behind winds up being a work of modest pleasures, where the way the verse eases into the chorus means more than the overall message, and this is truly the first U2 album where that sentiment applies -- but there is genuine pleasure in their craft, for the band and listener alike.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><p>The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind" implies facing up to their platinum salad days of the Edge's trademark echo shimmers and Paul "Bono Vox" Hewson's Lexus-honk vocals. For the general public, the title reifies our struggle to leave behind the image of Bono hatching from a disco lemon, dressed in that rayon six-pack t-shirt. For a band settled into four-letter pseudonyms from their 1980 debut, breaking up never seemed like an option. From day one, U2 was a rock constellation—a warplane—and we expected epics. It's an early affair, a hazy infatuation, that has since bloated into comfortable taking-for-granted. As with all ubiquitous products, the familiarity of logos, slogans, and icons eventually supplants whatever original feelings we may have had.</p><p>U2 are, indeed, a universal product, much like the Catholic Church Bono humbly admires. The swoosh on The Edge's skully cap, and the golden arches of Bono's glasses spring to mind. Song titles and lyrics on All That boldly declare familiar, safe dogma and generic commandments, such as "Grace", "Peace on Earth", "I believe in you," "Won't you take me, take me please," "I know it aches, and your heart breaks," etc. This new batch of songs heralds a conscious and welcome revocation of dance-inflected bubbleglam, but scales back too far. In searching so hard for their souls, U2 have hacked away their flesh and skull, leaving a lobotomized approximation of glory.</p><p>"Beautiful Day" opens with bombast after a cheeky keyboard tease, and peaks with Bono's cracking voice in the shouted coda: "What you don't have - You don't need it now!" And so the album climaxes at 3xBD minutes. The gospel ballad, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", maintains the buzz admirably, again peaking in the coda with Brian Eno's faux-brass keyboard belts. Elsewhere, Eno's fingerprints remain undusted. The album could have benefited from more of him; apparently, it takes Brian Eno + Berlin to = renaissance.</p><p>"Elevation" slaughters hope with reckless chops of the hackneyed sword, as Bono commits songwriting faux pas #1: rhyming "sky" with "fly" and "high." The details will be spared, but you can work it out. Damn you, God and aerodynamics, for making altitude a necessity for flight, in the sky, which happens to be above us. As the album's sticker proclaims, "Walk On" is locked and loaded as the second single. Epic midtempo should always follow punchy power-rock, you see. Nice, but unexciting. Here, Bono seems dead set on ruining U2's return with clichés. Minutes after the aforementioned poetic gaffe, he returns with, "A singing bird in a cage - Who will only fly - Fly for freedom." That little bird is you, guys! Free yourself from your cage! For freedom!</p><p>The record stomps around in this valley before mounting another two-song peak with "In a Little While" and "Wild Honey". On the former, the vulnerability of Bono's "vox" makes a welcome return from minute 3:30 to inject some heartfelt emotion into the tingling doo-wop. "That girl! - That girl! - She's mine," Bono bellows with larynx scratches, evoking the dead spirit of Van Morrison. "Wild Honey" similarly ob-la-dis like a giddy Van, and somehow escapes the shame of Bono declaring, "I was a monkey." Testament to the band there.</p><p>But it's back into the dark nadir until the album's closer. Bono joins hands with Sinead O'Connor in healing the world on the tepid carol, "Peace on Earth". "Jesus, can you take the time - To throw a drowning man a line," Bono asks. Hey, if the world is so dark, take off your sunglasses. Bono's Healing Heart takes a "look at the world" on the next track, and discovers that people "feel all kinds of things." Indeed.</p><p>But not even Tom Waits' grizzled pipes could salvage the atrocity of "New York". Over one of the best musical beds he's ever been offered, Bono weaves a Hallmark lover's tale, in the city where "Irish, Italians - Jews, and Hispanics - Religious nuts and political fanatics - Stir in the stew - Happily - Not like me and you." Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album—one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics. Beautiful day, certainly, but the rest of the week was all jetlag and rain. Can't The Edge sing, too?</p><p>— <strong>Brent Dicrescenzo, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| U2 | Live From Slane Castle | <p>Regardless of how big U2 is -- and where each member stands as a musician, politician, celebrity, or family man -- the four childhood friends always seem to return to their roots. U2 Go Home: Live From Slane Castle marks the joyous return of Ireland's top band at the close of their 2001 Elevation Tour. This DVD, the second video release from the same tour, was filmed in early September at Slane Castle, where U2 previously recorded The Unforgettable Fire. The band's transition from being an opening act in 1981 to a headliner in 2001 helps make this performance special, as does the fact that Ireland had earned a spot in the 2002 World Cup several hours before U2 took the stage. As a result, Live from Slane Castle captures the band at their best, playing a mix of old staples and All That You Can't Leave Behind-era hits to an ecstatic audience that sings along to every word. "Out of Control" sounds as sharp as it did in 1980, and "Beautiful Day" could possibly be the band's best stadium anthem ever. Spending time with this concert package will leave you grinning from ear to ear -- not only because you like U2 -- but because they've convinced you once again that they're the best rock & roll band in the world. [Bonus interactive material, as well as a digitally remastered version of The Unforgettable Fire documentary, is also included in this DVD set. For those who prefer the audio only, an official bootleg was released in 2007 to members of the band's fan club.]</p><p>—<strong>MacKenzie Wilson</strong></p> |
| U2 | Electrical Storm (SP) | |
| U2 | No Line On The Horizon | <p>A rock & roll open secret: U2 care very much about what other people say about them. Ever since they hit the big time in 1987 with The Joshua Tree, every album is a response to the last — rather, a response to the response, a way to correct the mistakes of the last album: Achtung Baby erased the roots rock experiment Rattle and Hum, All That You Can't Leave Behind straightened out the fumbling Pop, and 2009's No Line on the Horizon is a riposte to the suggestion they played it too safe on 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. After recording two new cuts with Rick Rubin for the '06 compilation U218 and flirting with will.i.am, U2 reunited with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (here billed as "Danny" for some reason), who not only produced The Joshua Tree but pointed the group toward aural architecture on The Unforgettable Fire. Much like All That You Can't and Atomic Bomb, which were largely recorded with their first producer, Steve Lillywhite, this is a return to the familiar for U2, but where their Lillywhite LPs are characterized by muscle, the Eno/Lanois records are where the band take risks, and so it is here that U2 attempts to recapture that spacy, mysterious atmosphere of The Unforgettable Fire and then take it further. Contrary to the suggestion of the clanking, sputtering first single "Get on Your Boots" — its riffs and "Pump It Up" chant sounding like a cheap mashup stitched together in GarageBand — this isn't a garish, gaudy electro-dalliance in the vein of Pop. Apart from a stilted middle section — "Boots," the hamfisted white-boy funk "Stand Up Comedy," and the not-nearly-as-bad-as-its-title anthem "I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight"; tellingly, the only three songs here to not bear co-writing credits from Eno and Lanois — No Line on the Horizon is all austere grey tones and midtempo meditation. It's a record that yearns to be intimate but U2 don't do intimate, they only do majestic, or as Bono sings on one of the albums best tracks, they do "Magnificent." Here, as on "No Line on the Horizon" and "Breathe," U2 strike that unmistakable blend of soaring, widescreen sonics and unflinching openhearted emotion that's been their trademark, turning the intimate into something hauntingly universal. These songs resonate deeper and longer than anything on Atomic Bomb, their grandeur almost seeming effortless. It's the rest of the record that illustrates how difficult it is to sound so magnificent. With the exception of that strained middle triptych, the rest of the album is in the vein of "No Line on the Horizon", "Magnificent" and "Breathe," only quieter and unfocused, with its ideas drifting instead of gelling. Too often, the album whispers in a murmur so quiet it's quite easy to ignore — "White as Snow," an adaptation of a traditional folk tune, and "Cedars of Lebanon," its verses not much more than a recitation, simmer so slowly they seem to evaporate — but at least these poorly defined subtleties sustain the hazily melancholy mood of No Line on the Horizon. When U2, Eno, and Lanois push too hard — the ill-begotten techno-speak overload of "Unknown Caller," the sound sculpture of "Fez-Being Born" — the ideas collapse like a pyramid of cards, the confusion amplifying the aimless stretches of the album, turning it into a murky muddle. Upon first listen, No Line on the Horizon seems as if it would be a classic grower, an album that makes sense with repeated spins, but that repetition only makes the album more elusive, revealing not that U2 went into the studio with a dense, complicated blueprint, but rather, they had no plan at all.</p><p>— <strong>Stephen Thomas Erlewine</strong></p><hr/><p>Why U2? How did these four Irishmen become the blueprint for every band with stadium aspirations? The Edge's churchly guitar chime—which thrives on the same arena acoustics that can turn otherwise booming bands into mud—is certainly a factor. So is their weakness for the big gesture—whether it be a giant lemon, heart, or mouth. And Bono's cathartic mix of modern panacea—love, God, mass culture—gives them a reach to the back row and beyond. But, perhaps above all else, the band's restlessness and willingness to challenge both themselves and their patrons is why the Killers, Kanye West, and Coldplay want to be the next U2 and not the next AC/DC. It's why these four Irishmen still represent the punk spirit decades after they emerged from it.</p><p>"You've got to balance being relevant and commenting on something that's happening today with trying to attain timelessness," philosophized the Edge in the early 1990s. The quote sounds like rock star bullshit...until you realize that's pretty much what U2 did for 20 years. From 1980 to 2000, it was difficult to tell exactly what the next U2 album would sound like. Briefly: They added atmosphere to new wave, looked for God and found hits, exhumed their rock'n'roll heroes, sent-up those same heroes while losing their religion, and punctured pop via mutated techno. Each move was more audacious than the last—even 1997 knee-jerk victim Pop saw the world-beating act taking completely unnecessary musical and financial risks in the name of Warholian post-modern pastiche. They then also managed to surprise on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind by successfully returning to form after shrugging off the notion for so many years. But 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and its subsequent tour were troubling.</p><p>That record saw four guys famous for dabbing classic rock into all sorts of impressionistic frames (or dismantling it entirely via Village People costumes) uncomfortably grasping for old-fashioned riffs, when they weren't mindlessly feasting on their own past. It was completely predictable ("City of Blinding Lights"), canned ("Vertigo"), and depressingly Sting-like ("A Man and a Woman"). But the group did little to hide the fact that they were basking in their early-century comeback's afterglow; in concert, in place of the ATYCLB tour's heart-shaped runway was a, um, circle-shaped runway. Still self-aware enough to sense stagnation, the quartet began to work on what would become No Line on the Horizon with new producer Rick Rubin and an imperative to break all those piling U2 trappings once again. As Bono told The New York Times this week: "When you become a comfortable, reliable friend, I'm not sure that's the place for rock'n'roll."</p><p>Sixteen years ago, U2 worked a snippet of Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" into their technologically prescient Zoo TV tour—perhaps fans should heed that bit of sampled advice right about now. Because while this group of slick talkers may have set out to expand their own definition once more, they've ended up with old collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois --along with an album that's neither relevant nor timeless.</p><p>First single "Get on Your Boots" is a worrisome harbinger—to call it a mess would be generous. The song combines sub-Audioslave riffs with Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" and sounds more disjointed than the worst Girl Talk rip off. "I don't wanna talk about wars between nations—not right now!" claims Bono on the song, before extolling the virtues of tight leather boots. His off-the-cuff attitude and delivery suggests a cheekiness missing from U2's music for more than a decade, but it's a red herring. While other tracks like "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" and "Stand Up Comedy" feature knowing lines that examine the singer's faults and hypocrisy, the album is heavy on half-assed word-salad characterizations and the sort of meaningless platitudes Bono used to be so great at (barely) avoiding. And there's a strong theme of resignation running through the record; whereas many classic U2 tracks have come from Bono's struggle with faith and certainty, he seems content to give up agency on songs like "Moment of Surrender" and "Unknown Caller". "I've found grace inside a sound," he sings on "Breathe", and the line seems like a cop-out from a man who spent so much time struggling with salvation.</p><p>Meanwhile, the album's ballyhooed experimentation is either terribly misguided or hidden underneath a wash of shameless U2-isms (the three-note ring Edge nicks from "Walk On" for "Unknown Caller", the "oh oh oh" outro from "Stay" apparently copied and pasted into "Moment of Surrender", etc.). While Eno used to work his unique sound-bobbles and ambiance into the fabric of U2 songs, he seems content to offer spacey intros totally disassociated from their accompanying tunes here (see: "Fez - Being Born", "Magnificent"). And oftentimes the band mistakes risk-taking for ill-fated arrangements and decisions. "Surrender"—reportedly improvised in one seven-minute take—comes across as lazy indulgence, and the title track's hard-nosed verse is torpedoed by its deflating fart of a hook. As the go-to sonic innovator of the group, the Edge dials in a particularly dispiriting performance throughout; his rare solos usually pack in enough panache to fill stadiums but his bluesy blah of a spotlight on "Surrender" would barely satisfy a single earbud.</p><p>"It keeps getting harder. You're playing against yourself and you don't want to lose," Adam Clayton told Q last month. And he's got a point. After nearly 30 years of chart crashing and sell-outs, starting afresh can't be easy. There's only one "One". In a way, U2 spoiled their followers by consistently questioning themselves while writing songs that straddled the personal and collective consciousness. But Horizon is clearly playing not to lose—it's a defensive gesture, and a rather pitiful one at that.</p><p>— <strong>Ryan Dombal, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Vangelis | Opera Savauge | |
| Various | Masters Of The Delta Blues | |
| Various | Anthology Of American Folk Music | |
| Various | Memphis Blues | |
| Various | Cotton Pickin' Blues | |
| Various | Tex Arkarna Lousiana Country 1927-1932 | |
| Various | Really! The Country Blues | |
| Various | Jazz Classics In Stereo Vol. 4 | |
| Various | Texarkana Blues | |
| Various | The String Bands Vol. 1 | |
| Various | Country Blues Encores | |
| Various | Crossroads - 20 Blues Classics | |
| Various | Midnight Special | |
| Various | Mr Charlie's Blues | |
| Various | Mister Charlies Blues | |
| Various | Country Blues - As Good As It Gets |
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