Review Summary: They knew much more then than they do now.
U2 have fallen off. For years, this fact was disputable—though you’d find fewer and fewer rebuttals as the decades passed, when exactly they reached that critical point of no return remains the subject of heated debate. Some claim it happened as early as the mid-80s, when the Irish quartet’s thunderous post-punk roots ceded territory to the ambience of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Others will insist the death spiral began in earnest with
Rattle & Hum, an overblown album/tour film detailing the band returning roots music to a country who’d never actually lost it. Course-correcting from there, the 90s spelled reinvention and overindulgence, Bono adopting personae to mock (and when he wasn’t careful, contribute to) the glitzy commercialization of new media and thoughtless consumerism that defined the increasingly globalized world. ZooTV and Popmart played fast and loose with satire, producing both overlooked diamonds and dated duds, but those eras were the last time, for better and worse, that U2 tried dancing on music's cutting edge.
Their 21st-century exploits contain arcs of their own, but they can be crudely bundled together and summarized by the battle between a band too comfortable with their formulas to shapeshift but too insecure to go gentle into that good night. They reportedly gave “Vertigo” to Apple after years of objecting to corporate licensing because incessant iPod ads were “the only way people would realize how good that riff was.” They distributed a whole album for free just to ensure it’d reach more people’s ears, only for the masses to scold them for invading their digital privacy. These are not the actions of a band content with riding out their legacy; they’re the actions of a band so uncertain about their lasting influence they will do whatever it takes to wrest the spotlight back towards themselves. That tenacity is almost—
almost—inspiring. The new tunes were less so; 2014’s
Songs of Innocence sought to commentate their career’s mythology in flashback while 2017’s
Songs of Experience appealed to their supposed maturity, each album yielding, as nearly all U2 albums have, a smattering of worthy highlights interspersed with a slog of middling filler. Worse yet,
Innocence &
Experience failed to say anything novel about their journey as a band or growth as individuals. Devotees already had all the material they wanted. There were no impartial, casual listeners left to grab. The question became unavoidable; who is new U2 material even
for?
About five years later and in conjunction with Saint Patrick’s Day, because of course they would,
Songs of Surrender imposingly arrives with a girth so gargantuan the few newcomers who stumble across it will hastily retreat if they know what’s good for them: its 4-disc, 40-song collection of re-recorded tunes clocking in at just under three hours was devised as a challenge to its creators first and foremost, and only fanatics are likely to invest as much time in it as they did. “It’s both a vanity project and a grudge match,” Bono explained in an interview with Zane Lowe; it's a vanity project because after years of bemoaning missed opportunities to alter lyrics with unmet potential or strip back their writing to its essentials, he and The Edge felt they owed it to themselves to actually try. It's a grudge match because they then had to make those renditions live up to the originals that fans have cherished for generations. As they have been for quite some time, the results on both those fronts are mixed.
It’s worth noting the task wasn’t without practical limitations: drummer Larry Mullen Jr. had developed serious joint pain, so in addition to sitting out the band’s upcoming concerts, his presence on
Songs of Surrender is minimal, primarily contributing kick drums, brushed snares, and hand percussion if anything at all. Adam Clayton's bass parts largely seem like an afterthought as well. With only sparing exceptions, this collection’s orchestrations constitute shrunken, mellower variants of the band’s established hits, re-developed from the ground up using acoustic guitar, piano, and synth pads. As you’d expect from an effort this sprawling, that template gets monochromatic and stale quickly; even when the band settles into a sweet spot by reproducing recent songs well-suited for Tiny Deskification (“Lights of Home,” “The Little Things That Give You Away,” “Song For Someone,” and non-album singles “Ordinary Love” and “Invisible” stand out in this regard), they can’t help but feel like risk-averse retreads, mere additional takes to existing counterparts that aren’t different enough to justify taking up so much space.
Sadly, those cuts are among the highlights here, too; it’s more common for the band to sound like they’re performing karaoke of their own songs. Bono’s gruff, age-weathered voice frequently slurs melismatic runs, gratuitously flitting into a pitchy falsetto (seriously, take shots on each of these and you’ll end up in the ER) or comically over-enunciating to compensate for a body whose confidence has finally overtaken its actual ability. Even when they think better of having him try to belt high notes—see: “Pride (In The Name of Love),” whose final chorus includes Bono harmonizing with the stem of the original recording—it’s impossible to ignore the sad reality that his iconic charisma with a microphone is well and truly past anything that could be considered its prime. By my count, The Edge handles the lead on four songs—“Stories for Boys,” “Peace on Earth,” “Two Hearts Beat As One,” and “Desire,”—and he can hit and hold pitches with greater resilience than his bandmate who’s supposed to be carrying this project front and center. Bono’s weakened presence doesn’t necessarily matter in every nook and cranny of
Songs of Surrender since the album inoffensively orbits the softest of soft rock proclivities, but it’s not a good sign when the band playing it safe is deemed a pro instead of a con, especially when that very con had been the easiest slight leveled against them for the past 20-odd years.
Speaking of cons, the few times this album’s arrangements don’t stay the course, they wind up in truly bizarre territory; “The Fly,” for instance, is not a song tailored for
Songs of Surrender’s overarching properties, so to force a square peg into a round hole, the group saunters the track into a sleepy electro-funk groove replete with Latin percussion and muddy bass that sounds like a throwaway jingle for a spy flick. “Two Hearts Beat as One” spikes up the tempo in a whirlpool of wah-wah, lurching piano licks, and Mediterranean-tinged folk music, and it’s certainly...
something, though a definitive assessment eludes me at present. Not even The Edge could save “Desire” from its clipped mix and warbling synth leads, while some stinkers from the back catalogue like
Pop's “If God Will Send His Angels” and
Experience's “Get Out of Your Own Way” smell spoiled on arrival. In these most atrocious moments, U2 sound no more proficient at either songwriting or performing than those uncles you try your hardest to avoid at family get-togethers who send everyone scrambling at the first stride towards a guitar case.
Songs of Surrender trickles a meager stream of genuine successes, but only because the law of averages suggests it has to; “Every Breaking Wave” evokes the minimalist arrangement it morphed into on the Innocence + Experience Tours, and it, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” and “Stay (Faraway, So Close)” feature Bono’s voice at its most emotive and entrancing, refusing to stray from the basics of what makes those songs so arresting at their core. “11 O Clock Tick Tock” effectively utilizes (sit down for this one, I don’t want to shock you)
counterpoint, swaying with a suave, elegant air, and the now brass-fronted “Red Hill Mining Town” is arguably superior or equal to its original composition, a deep cut from
The Joshua Tree.
Between those slim rewards, however, the body-less “Beautiful Day,” this on-the-nose “Walk On,” and the downright silly “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” don’t just deflate U2 hits of yore, they belittle and stifle the grandiosity that made their canon performances so endearing. Despite Bono’s insistence that “songs are like your parents: they tell you what to do,” transplanted lines about Biblical feminism, the Russian war on Ukraine, and uhhhh [checks notes]
“Viva viva la Ramone! / We will never be alone!” (Christ almighty) are not, as he’d state, overdue corrections; they’re momentary pastiches squeezed into the broken molds of classics whose shelf life isn’t actually under threat—and if it were, these limp experiments wouldn’t meaningfully salvage it. Unsatisfied coming off two albums of retrospective autobiography,
Songs of Surrender’s revisionist history with half the input and twice the asking price signals an incontestable creative dead end; an
S.O.S., if you will. They didn’t do this for us; they did it for themselves. Once upon a time—and that time is also up for debate—the line between these two motivations was blurry enough for their audiences to not know the difference. U2 knew much more then than they appear to now.
