U2's tenth studio album and third masterpiece,
All That You Can't Leave Behind, is all about the simple
melding of craft and song. Their first masterpiece,
1987's The Joshua Tree, imagined cathedrals of
ecstasy; their second, 1991's Achtung Baby,
banged around fleabag hotels of agony. But on All
That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 distill two decades
of music-making into the illusion of effortlessness
usually only possible from veterans. The album
represents the most uninterrupted collection of
strong melodies U2 have ever mounted, a record
where tunefulness plays as central a role as on any
Backstreet Boys hit. "I'm just trying to find a decent
melody," Bono sings with soulful patience in "Stuck
in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "a song that I
can sing in my own company."
Since they shot out of Ireland in 1980, U2 have
believed that pop could sing like angels and move
like the devil. They have always known devoutly that
studio style facilitates meaning. It's why they have
always seemed so modern -- this conviction that
their sonic play of shades, textures, levels and
dissolves amounts to more than an end in itself. This
belief has always loomed enormously for U2, from
the beat-oriented hummable songs of their first
albums, which warmed up New Wave's chilly airs, to
the largesse of their War-period arena performances,
to their engagement with the geniuses of U.S. roots
music, through to their itchy recastings, on Achtung
Baby, of transcontinental love and panic. This
restlessness reached a high point in 1997, when U2
released Pop, an album dipped in club music and
dead set on ironic kicks.
Now, after spending twenty years pushing different
styles through the roof, on All That You Can't Leave
Behind they table everything except that which now
seems most crucial: the songs themselves. All That
You Can't Leave Behind flexes with an interior fire.
Every track -- whether reflective but swinging, like
"Wild Honey," or poised, then pouncing, like
"Beautiful Day" -- honors a tune so refined that each
seems like some durable old number. Because this
is U2, there's a quick impact to these melodies, yet
each song has a resonance that doesn't fade with
repeated listening.
The melodies mirror the album's production, which is
carried off with seeming invisibility by seasoned U2
hands Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, with Steve
Lillywhite showing up for a few mixes. Everything
coheres in a kind of classically U2 sonic clench:
"Walk On" addresses perseverance and reward in its
lyrics, but the song is really about its minor-key
dance of guitars and rhythms, vocal yearning and
hope. "Kite" is about the plight of a fraying couple;
when Bono glimpses "the shadow behind your
eyes," his lyric evokes the music's slanted
conversations of melody and rhythm and guitar
figures. Bono's singing has lost some of the extra
flamboyance it's had in the past, but it's as
passionate as ever -- by reining himself in, he has
invested his voice with a new urgency.
All That You Can't Leave Behind gets serious about
simplicity. The songs aren't obscured by excessive
production, but the band doesn't commit the
common sin of boring people silly in the name of
scaling back. The Edge's guitars are even more
self-effacing than usual, showing up only as
conveyors of accent and texture. On "In a Little
While," Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer
Larry Mullen sink deeply into an Al Green
whisper-groove, a feat of complex plainness. On the
very London pop tune "When I Look at the World,"
Christmassy synths and choruses achieve an earthy
focus, as Bono taps the silver at the top end of his
voice.
U2 are no longer idealistic kids. In "New York," the
album's penultimate moment, Bono sings as a man
in "midlife crisis," desperately drawn to that city's
unique brew of noise and reason, chaos and
sensation. Scattered through the songs are
references to having seen and felt and lived a lot.
The band is still looking for what's essential, but on
All That You Can't Leave Behind, the drama of that
search exists right in the music itself, in the tension
between rage and gentleness. On "Grace," Bono
highlights a girl who "makes beauty out of ugly
things." All That You Can't Leave Behind asks the
same question again and again: What else in this
damaged world would you spend time looking for?
(RS 853)
JAMES HUNTER