That manual title, How To Dismantle An Atom Bomb, may suggest a return to U2 at their posturing, world-preaching worst but not so.

The album, their 11th studio set since 1980's Boy, was recorded over two years in a Dublin dockside street and it is the sound of the world's biggest band getting their hands dirty while Bono sings of love and death, families and spiritualism.

Recordings sessions were work not leisure, five days a week in cramped conditions, with nightshifts to meet the onrushing deadlines, and you can hear the sweat, toil and grime in Steve Lillywhite's production. Instead of a sheen, he gives U2 the atomic hiss of distortions, strange sounds and industrial dust.

Their previous album, 2001's All That You Can't Leave Behind, was a retrenchment to the old U2, an acknowledgement that you can't throw off the golden past. Atom Bomb is another reinvention of U2's 1980s, but one that pushes once more at the boundaries of the underground, without the cumbersome irony of their 1990s arthouse phase. Goodbye style, hello content.

For every application of The Edge's "Coca Cola riffs" (his spot-on description of his glistening guitar style) on the epic Miracle Drug and Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, there is the head-spinning urgency of Vertigo and Fast Cars or the swirling swamp blues of Love And Peace Or Else.

U2 are still fresh and exhilarating, remarkable for a band that started out in 1978, the year the Rolling Stones last made a decent album, Some Girls. Live Licks is everything to like least about the hoary old British rockers: a bloated, flaccid exercise in American stadium rock in 2003, where Mick Jagger indulges himself in twisting his fake estuary vowels into ever more absurd shapes.

The supposed attraction is "11 unique tracks that have never ever been recorded live by the Stones", but who wants to hear concert dullards Worried About You or You Don't Have To Mean It? As U2 have discovered post-Pop and Macphisto, you do have to mean it.

Updated: 10:58 Thursday, December 02, 2004