MESSIANIC rockstar moves notwithstanding, 40 years of mega success have bequeathed Bono and the boys with vulnerable foreboding for a world through which they once swaggered, or so it would appear with this, their 14th studio album.
Although for most UK listeners the first subsonic impression will be their indelible distaste for Bono’s financial affairs or political activism, Songs Of Experience is a masterclass on balancing texture, industrial riffing and melodic, lyrical yearning.
Opening with the blissed-out ambience of Love Is All We Have Left, Bono’s honey croak lays out the bleak remit of the album: that "the end isn’t coming, the end is here". Depth, then, but done the U2 way.
Cue fragile confusion in The Little Thing That Gives You Away, building to its irresistible crescendo with both Al Green vocal delivery and stadium-shaking power chords. American Soul surfs a wave of longing muezzin for “a country, to me a thought, that offers grace, to every welcome that is sought”, while finale There Is A Light distils the Dublin band’s disillusionment with our times in an antiphonal dirge, a multi-voiced requiem for an era in which the liberal progressive took liberty and equality for granted.
It is not all sorrow, however. There are bursts of anger, with the intimate night terrors of one man becoming communal calls to arms, best made manifest in The Blackout. Built around a muscular INXS-infused riff, it says something that in 2017 there are few things more life affirming than an anthemic attack on the death of democracy.
Nor is it without levity. The armour-plated pop of You’re The Best Thing About Me lightens the mood with whimsical self mockery, and another highlight, Summer Of Love, has Edge’s sensual guitar clinging to the lyrics like phosphorescence.
Songs Of Experience provides closure to 2014’s Songs Of Innocence, with references to that opus appearing throughout, unpacking and consolidating themes of hope, loss and joy, much in the same way William Blake did with the poems that provide these albums’ titles. Songs Of oE’ withstands its literary indulgences. If it is the swansong I think it is, it is a solid success.
Review by Greg McGee
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