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With its Blakean set-up, there was hope that U2’s Songs of Experience might have seen the mature U2 pugnaciously restate their purpose, 14 albums into their career. Songs of Innocence (2014) focused tightly on the band’s formative experiences against the backdrop of the Troubles. This latest album, its promised companion piece, could have taken on a few flavours. The dismantling of democracy by social media bots could have drawn forth from this grandstanding band a savvy take-down of new media and the distraction industry (think Zooropa retooled). Certainly, the icy, quivering strings that open the album (which, deliciously, recall Choir on Perfume Genius’s No Shape LP) could have given way to a spacious sidekick to 2009’s No Line on the Horizon.
Alternatively, these tumultuous 24 months could have drawn out of U2 a towering inferno of humane righteousness – think (Pride) In the Name of Love on steroids, or Lemon with Celtic guitars. When a Bono vocal sample landed on XXX on Kendrick Lamar’s Damn album, the compass was spinning that way. A coruscating Kendrick returns the favour here on Get Out Of Your Own Way. But U2’s political engagement is painted in mere watercolours here. (“Nothing’s stopping you except what’s inside,” counsels Bono, abdicating responsibility, “I can help you, but it’s your fight.”)
By contrast, American Soul finds some backbone; at least this time, Bono is unequivocally calling the US (a country founded by refugees, an idea and “a sound”, more than “a place”) to account for its lapses in idealism. There are other strong tunes here: The Showman (Little More Better) is a nagging, 60s-inclined ditty in which Bono ponders the disingenuousness of frontmen, fulfilling, for once, the Blake imperative. “Making a spectacle of falling apart,” he confides, “is just the start of the show.”
There is little evidence of any alarm or horror here: both key to Blake’s Experience poems
But you can’t help but feel that the band who toured their 30-year-old hymn to Americana, The Joshua Tree, so successfully this year could have brought some of that album’s swaggering authority to bear here. As it is, this is a try-hard record, produced to sound good on a playlist next to many of Ryan Tedder’s (one of the credited helpmeets here) other hits – so much so that the Edge’s arpeggiating guitar is only intermittently audible. There is little evidence, however, of any alarm or horror here: both key to Blake’s Experience poems.
There is rather more on the consolations and risks of love. Landlady is a song about enduring love, addressed to Bono’s other half. A kind of radical positivity has been one perfectly legitimate response to the events of the past couple of years.
Coming from U2, however, lines such as “get out of your own way” and “nothing to stop this from being the best day ever” (Love Is All We Have Left) and “love is bigger than anything in its way” feel like arena-sized generalities. They provide a sense of succour that denies the urgency of the here and now.
Many fans will enjoy this album’s radio-friendliness, and its warm hugs. But these Songs of Experience lack William Blake’s moral fervour or rage.
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