U2 Discussion

U2 have debuted one of their new songs in the trailer for the upcoming film MANDELA. The track, "Ordinary Love" will likely appear on U2's forthcoming album, confirmed by most sources as due for release in early 2014. Reported influences for the new album include Talking Heads, Ramones, electronica and early U2. The album will assumedly consist of the material the band produced with Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton). Bassist Adam Clayton confirmed that the 12-track album is currently undergoing finishing touches so that the band can relax and enjoy Christmas before releasing the album. The reported album title, TEN REASONS TO EXIST, now obviously seems highly unlikely (save for a slight numerical alteration), but no other titles have surfaced as yet for the new record. Anyway, here's the snippet of "Ordinary Love"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y02MY6hseU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Not yet sold by that snippet, which may in part be due to my current threatening Iron Maiden relapse.
Anyway, Ramones influence on a U2 work is always welcome.

Bonio sounds like Sting on that track, though that is a vast improvement in my book.

Argh, this somehow passed me by in my giddy excitement at the Dr Who 50th trailer ... and of course I can't watch now 'cause YouTube doesn't make it through the 'net filter in work.

About damn time new stuff was coming out ... the question is (and I speak as a fan) do people still care? They're still an unquestionably big draw as a live act (360 is the biggest-grossing tour in rock history, I think), but the singles from No Line On The Horizon were flops and the album is regarded by the band as an under-performer.

Are there still any singles on sale? I thought everybody gets shit from youtube nowadays? Oh wait, there´s itunes selling stuff, right? Ah well, never was a singles man, even though I am single at the moment.

Sounds bleeding awful. Sorry.

LA Times wrote:

U2 talks of new album in the works & Nelson Mandela

BY STEVEN ZEITCHIK December 19, 2013, 2:00 p.m.

NEW YORK — Bono took a look around the cluttered recording studio, filled with Coke bottles and laptops and vinyl records, and turned to a reporter.

'I'm not sure where we put the crack pipe," he deadpanned, pretending to riffle around a coffee table as he also poked at the band's workaholic image. "We usually leave it out for guests."

A moment later the U2 frontman had cranked up a track from the band's work-in-progress April album, an anthemic number about leaving one's hometown titled "Invisible." As the song played, he spiritedly played air guitar to it, also belting along with the track's vocals, so that, in effect, Bono was performing a duet with himself. The 53-year-old rock star's self-mocking turn is enjoyably at odds with his self-serious public image, a sign of an icon who knows when not to be iconic. But similarly surprising is his approach to the music, a kind of boyish giddiness suggesting that, even after 12 studio albums and thousands of shows, that's really what matters, perhaps more now than in a long while.

After years of being known as much for activism as rock 'n' roll — the day after the studio session, Nelson Mandela will have passed away, and an essay from Bono recollecting his impressions of the South African leader and friend will have materialized on Time.com — U2 had perhaps its most commercially disappointing album in decades with 2009's "No Line on the Horizon." They also worked on some aborted projects that led to just one new studio album in the past nine years. So now they're shaking things up.

The band, which of course also includes guitarist Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., came up with the concept of a collection of songs told partly from the perspective of an innocent and partly from a seasoned veteran. And they brought on the electronic dance music producer Danger Mouse to help them craft it.

Told that some fans were still puzzling over how that collaboration would work, Edge, 52, laughed. "I think we're still figuring that out ourselves," he said.

On this December evening the band moved between studio rooms. In one, engineers tried different mixes as Bono sang along and gave notes in equal proportion. In another, Mullen, Edge and several others were tinkering with some rhythms. "You're seeing a little bit of creativity as it happens," Mullen said. "Like penguins in the wild.

But the first salvo in the Irish megagroup's latest musical phase has already happened. U2 recently released its first new song in nearly three years, "Ordinary Love," an ode to Nelson and Winnie Mandela that appears on the soundtrack to Justin Chadwick's newly released biopic, "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom." The song was nominated for a Golden Globe last week and is likely to get an Oscar nod next month.

"Ordinary Love" is a throwback, mid-tempo number that would not have been out of place on one of the band's 1980s albums, and a song that walks the line, as it has for U2 so many times before, between the personal and the political. "We can't fall any further if we can't feel ordinary love," it goes, narrating the tremulous relationships both among a citizenry and its symbolic First Family.

"It's a plea for common decency among the people who've been oppressed," Bono said at dinner earlier in the evening. "And it's a plea for common decency in a marriage as it starts to fall apart."

U2 hoped to portray the complexity of the Mandela relationship, according to Chadwick, who called it "a film that deals with apartheid but is really about love". The film's producer, longtime Mandela friend Anant Singh, sent Bono love letters that Nelson Mandela wrote to his wife from his prison cell on Robben Island, and the band set about turning its poetry into lyrics.

"We thought it should be a love song, a very human song. Not epic, not earnest in dealing with world-changing political shifts," Edge said, "but personal in two people trying to hold on to one another in the face of dreadful mistreatment and heartbreak."

Mandela was a huge influence on the members of U2, who played early anti-apartheid shows. Bono and Edge said that, though it was his political leadership that the world knew Mandela for, in person it was Mandela's dry wit that would win you over.

"He would always turn on the humor, mock you a little and then mock himself. Mostly himself," Bono said.

And if he wanted the rock star to undertake a cause, he would convince him in an unconventional way — with a little reverse psychology.

"He'd say 'You shouldn't do this; it's a complete waste of your time,'" Bono recalled, rendering a spot-on impression of the South African icon's mellifluous, halting speech pattern. "'A man like you, with such responsibilities? Why would you want to be at a concert to celebrate an old man like me?'" Bono laughed. "And suddenly you were putty in his hands."

Added Edge: "That's his philosophy of dealing with the world."

It's a similar approach for the band these days. A natural extrovert, Bono in person comes off as much as a comic presence as an activist. "If you have any sense as a band that you could be not just a sop but a salve, you have a moral duty to respond," he said, when asked if the group's activist reputation ever grew burdensome. "And that," he added, with a poker face, "can make you a total pain in the butt".

He also quipped to Edge: "The whole thing about being in a band is like being on an oil rig. Just a lot of men. We really need to change that."

Edge, in his trademark knit hat and biker-esque facial hair, volleyed back, "I told you we should have had a girl drummer."


Dressed in a green military cap, black jeans and several layers to ward off the New York chill, Bono was standing in a soundproof room filled with engineers. Every once in a while someone handed him a microphone. Bono reaches for a microphone the way a baby reaches for a lollipop, with the easy sense he knows exactly what to do with it. Barely pausing his conversation with a reporter, he began singing, rocking slowly back and forth as his facial muscles clenched. Then in a musician equivalent of a no-look pass, he handed back the mike to an engineer as he continued bantering with a reporter.

"Not to sound pretentious—not that it’s ever stopped us before,” he said as he described the new record.

Oh yes, about that record. From the few tracks heard that night, it has traces of the Clash and Sex Pistols and Kraftwerk — "stuff we were really listening to when we were younger," said Bono. But it also comes laden with soul and old-school R&B, genres the singer said he and friends were listening to in the 1970s, only "once punk came along, no one admitted it." It, too, walks the line between the political and the personal, with one song title connoting a difficult period but really referring to a personal trauma.

Thematically, the album will center on the collision between hard-earned wisdom and youthful hunger. For present-day U2 — sometimes branching out in new directions even as it so often returns to its roots, and still vital even as it stands just a few years shy of its 40th anniversary —that tension couldn't be more fitting.

The band has reportedly been entertaining corporate suitors for a Super Bowl ad to introduce the new record. But Bono waved aside a question about those plans. There's still work to be done, an album to fine tune, all-night sessions that mean dinners eaten directly off sound boards.

So engineers continued to tinker with Bono's vocal chord-straining falsetto, the sound that has defined him and U2 as far back as albums like "War" and "The Unforgettable Fire." "There's just something about a bloke who sings like a chick," Bono cracked to a reporter. And then practically in the same motion, he turned, took the mike and unleashed another one of those vocals.

Oh well, at least if we have to wait until April then there's a good chance that the underwhelming ORDINARY LOVE will be deemed too old for inclusion on the album. I'll continue to live in hope that Danger Mouse can drag some real creativity out of U2 for this album.

Just an excuse to put this here...when Tomb Raider came out in 2001 I got the soundtrack and used this song for very naughty things.

Titles apparently being bandied around for the new album include '10 Reasons To Exist' and 'Songs Of Ascent'. Bono's buddy Gavin Friday says that 'It certainly is a development, what hits you is how fresh it sounds', while Daniel Lanois says that what he's heard is 'Amazing, adventurous ... very, very big and powerful-sounding'.

Anyone else heard 'Invisible', the track that was free to download on iTunes Sunday/Monday? I quite like it, enjoying the Joy Divison/Kraftwerk influences on it.

Hope the album version of Invisible is better. There are things I like about it such as the electronics and hope they go further with those elements on the album, but Invisible as a song just gives up in the final quarter and peters out like an irrelevant b-side. Hopefully there is far better to come.

Album now delayed until next year, along with tour. It's getting hard to care anymore anyway. New material has been iffy, so maybe good not to release album if the likes of Invisible are representations of the album's "quality". New Moz album will fill the void nicely for this year anyway.

Agreed on the hope that the album or eventual "Invisible" release is better, the second half does indeed peter out and what the song ultimately feels like is a halfhearted attempt at making the marketable single complete with innumerable self references.
"Ordinary Love" has really improved with the remixed version and all the acoustic appearances the band has done.

The influences listed sound promising, but when the album finally comes out, I just hope it's something they're proud of doing. By the end of the 360 tour they had really reached a pinnacle of unknown territory, in that throughout the NLOTH album there is a sense of struggling to come to terms with who they are and why they make music to begin with (reminiscent of The Unforgettable Fire) and on the tour's last leg this resulted in near 10 minute extended versions of "Moment of Surrender".

I really wouldn't mind a NLOTH II...just recorded and mastered with proper dynamics intact...and minus any silly tracks designed for mass appeal....stupid "I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" grr!

There's always hope with these guys. I was staggered by "Cedars of Lebanon" which I think is their best song since Zooropa.

They can pull it off when they want to, but what they need to do is make a record that THEY want to make, not just safe and self-referential box tickers aimed at the converted. This may sound mad, but I'd actually ban Edge's signature guitar sound from the new album and start from there. Zooropa was a great example of what they can do when they let go of tiresome stadium rock and let Edge loose in other areas. I actually wouldn't mind them just giving all their new material to a top remixer who would turn the whole set of songs into an exciting and modern album, something U2 themselves now seem totally incapable of doing. All of the remixes of tracks from NLOTH were better than the original versions: Magnificent became a celebratory discofied pulser instead of a formulaic pile of tiresome unashamed U2ism, I'll Go Crazy fizzed instead of cringed and even Get On Your Boots was pulled out of embarrassment and into near-coolness in a couple of good remixes. No point bringing people like Danger Mouse in to freshen up the sound when the band are clearly instead simply forcing him to tow the same old tiresome line with them. The band need a massive wake-up call before they descend into heritage act hell like the Stones.

Lazenby. wrote:

Album now delayed until next year, along with tour.

Ach, really? FFS, what's happened to the band who managed to write, record and release Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Passengers, Pop and All That You Can't Leave Behind between 1990 and 2000 whilst also spending a considerable chunk of that decade on tour? Granted, they're no spring chickens anymore. But still.

IMO, they used INVISIBLE to test the waters. When the response to that track was lukewarm and didn't garner the kind of seismic attention they'd have hoped for, I guess they knew the new material wouldn't give them the big hits they crave after the commercial failure of the singles from NLOTH. What I wish they'd realise is that NLOTH was actually WEAKENED by it's attempts at shoehorning potential hit singles into it; that album's midsection of stodgy, ill-fitting attempted hits and "anthems" was not only the album's weakest stretch but it also threw the album off-kilter thematically and tonally. They seriously need to get with the program and realise that fiftysomething rockers stand very little chance of landing singles at the top end of the charts in the current ageist and over-urbanised climate. Bowie going top 5 last year was an isolated incident indebted to a huge wave of relief that Bowie wasn't ill or dying and hadn't released a thing in ten years. U2 have no such luxury to rely on, so it's time they quit trying to force out formulaic anthems and just concentrate on making a cohesive album which is actually ABOUT something. If INVISIBLE had gone down a storm, I'd bet we'd have had an album out this year.

Apple's giving away U2's new album Songs of Innocence right now. When I say giving it away, I mean giving a shitload of money to U2 to do so. Which U2 can tax shelter in Liechtenstein while telling the rest of us to do more for Africa. Allegedly.

Anyway, if you want it, sign in to iTunes and spray it across the ether, baby.

http://www.apple.com/U2/

Well, that worked. I now have a U2 album I never wanted.

Fuck.

Me too, although I DID want it.

I'm listening to it now. Took 30 years, but the U2 pod got me in the end.

Invasion of the Erica Snatchers.

Have only listened to The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) so far. Liking the fuzzed-up geetar.

Any idea about The Edge's guitar sound on Invisible? I asked producer Ed Buller about it over on JWFan and he said he'll relay the question to Flood when they next have a Node interview.

Will wait till next month for the wax cylinder release.

Largo's Shark wrote:

Any idea about The Edge's guitar sound on Invisible? I asked producer Ed Buller about it over on JWFan and he said he'll relay the question to Flood when they next have a Node interview.

http://www.u2interference.com/forums/f197/invisible-guitar-discussion-216475.html


Anything in there of interest, Sharky?

Listened to the new album a couple of times yesterday. First impressions:

THE GOOD:
Consistency, even though the tracks are all mostly average, not many of them are noticeably better than others, and none of the tracks are complete clusterfucks or terribly misjudged attempts at killer singles, such as GET ON YOUR BOOTS, I'LL GO CRAZY etc from the previouus album.
Running order is decent enough.
Some nice if hardly mindblowing stuff here, such as SLEEP LIKE A BABY and THE TROUBLES.

THE BAD:
Far too average and unremarkable an album to justify a 5 and a half year wait. As the promised quick follow-up album to NLOTH, this would have been an acceptable result of a year's work, but five years should result in far more remarkable a return than this.
Generic music in many places here. Yes, Coldplay, The Script, OneRepublic etc all blatantly take influence from U2, but U2 should have the class to move a step up from this lot rather than merely fall into line with the unremarkable dadrock mediocrity of that lot. This is the band that made ZOOROPA, ACHTUNG BABY, THE JOSHUA TREE, THE UNFORGETTABLE FIRE and even PASSENGERS and POP, records which will always elevate U2 above their one-note imitators. The safe lack of ambition and creativity on this album is a real disappointment.

Overall, I'm neither here nor there on this album. It's just a very ordinary U2 album.