Everybody's favorite Dubliners are back and ready to spin with their new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Kenneth Tanner, reviewing U2's latest, moonlights on National Review.
A question that members of every band should ask themselves is, "how and why did U2 stay together?" Yes, in the beginning, it was all the four had — except for maybe Larry Mullen, Jr., who has always struck me as tickled pink to have made millions playing his beloved drums but would be just as happy working for an honest nickel with a motorcycle in the garage. After the 1983 War album, the band's third, the point when bassist Adam Clayton claims their debt to Island Records was finally paid in full, one might assume debt to one another was as well. But four years and two albums later, U2 released its largest-selling and most popular record, The Joshua Tree. They toured and toured. Four more years and two more albums beyond that, the record hailed by the music industry as U2's successful reinvention — Achtung Baby — hit stores and the Zoo TV tour crossed the globe for another two years. That only leaves us in the mid-1990s.
Was it the simple association of perpetual success, not comradery, that kept the four on stage, in the studio and a part of each other's lives? Ask two English contemporaries whose careers have run nearly parallel to their Irish counterparts': Robert Smith of the Cure and Alan Wilder, formerly of Depeche Mode. Since 1979's Three Imaginary Boys, songman Smith has remained the single fixture of his music, whatever the moniker. Everyone else comes and goes. Wilder joined Mode in 1982 to tour for its second album, A Broken Frame, and left in 1995, after the band's self-destructive Devotional tour; tired of too much work of too little interest for too little credit. U2 has never been much of a counterculture or protest band, instead the respectful, if starry-eyed utopist, conscience of rock and roll. But they shied away from normal life and wages early on and never returned, so it's a little ironic and a lot more comforting to see four men aging in a beloved career that never left its first office.
If mothers want to show their boys rock stars who never descended to the base of the occupation; who came, played with the best and left as themselves, U2 is the first and last example.
So, how's the music? I loved their download-only single released this fall, "Vertigo": for those in the know, it had the lyrical freshness of Boy, the energy of October and the muscle of 1995 single "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me." It rocked. Skipping through the disc and glancing at the liner notes, I hear interesting hooks and melodies; creative production by four-time producer Steve Lillywhite. I'm looking forward to a thorough introduction and a long acquaintance thereafter. Bono's up to his adolescent wish-making for goodwill to men to come with much less effort and difficulty than is possible in the real world, but we can grant him some artistic and idealistic license: nobody else in rock and roll is wishing. U2's the only act of its kind.