Recently, U2 came out with a new album, No Line On The Horizon. At this point in their career, I’m not exactly waiting at the record store at midnight for their newest release. At best, I hoped that it wouldn’t be horrible. At worst, I cringed at what this would do for their legacy.

So, when March 3rd rolled around, I fired up Rhapsody, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. After the first run through, I wasn’t totally put off, to the extent that I went back for a second and third and fourth listen. I had mixed feelings about what was going on. So, because I have little faith in my own opinions and require the backup of more experienced minds, I went in search of reviews. My current favorite on these general media matters is Metacritic. For movie reviews, I usually turn to Rotten Tomatoes, which gives a ‘big picture’ view on a movie’s critical reception. But for all other media (games, music), it’s Metacritic. So I looked at Metacritic’s rundown of No Line On The Horizon. A 72. Meaning generally favorable, but not world-beating. But then looking down, I see that the three highest scores are 100. Now, with metacritic, 100 isn’t always 100 — they’ll convert a score based on a star system to it’s numeric counterpart, and if a review doesn’t have any rating at all, they’ll give it one based on the tone of the review. So I went ahead and read a few of the reviews that I could read (Rolling Stone, Blender). I was amazed at the phrases I was reading. “Third killer album in a row”. “…the clean gleam and rocket’s arc of [Bono's] voice.” “But it’s Bono who dominates.”

What are these people smoking? Did these people listen to the same album I did? I was so confused, I ended up pulling out The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop, and All That You Can’t Leave Behind from the dusty shelves of my CD rack to figure out if they’re hearing things that I’m not.

See, the thing is : Bono kills this album. His voice, in my view, has deteriorated greatly from the 80′s and mid 90′s. When Pop came out, I was struck by how horrible he sounded, although for that album, his hoarseness actually added something for many of the songs. In general, I thought that album was under-rated. For ATYCLB, his voice was back, so I thought that maybe he stopped treating his vocal chords like crap and they just got better. For NLOTH, though, he compounded a bad voice with bad vocal choices. This album, Bono excepting, isn’t that bad (yeah, I know, a ringing endorsement). In fact, a lot of it sounds like classic, anthemic U2. But every song that I find redeeming musically is ruined by Bono doing something obnoxious, either with a strange vocal flourish or a weird similie, eg. “Like a small child crossing an eight lane highway on a voyage of discovery.” I find the opening song to be haunting (in a good way), but I can’t stand Bono’s “Whoa whoa whoa” flourish at the end of each line, and “then she stuck her tongue in my ear” is not an acceptable rhyme to “time is irrelevant, it’s not linear”. “Magnificent” is probably the best song on the album, classic U2, but the chorus is a cheesy paean to love. “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” is another song in the classic U2 vein, but I can’t get past the stupid, horrible title. Almost every song that is actually catchy has some glaring flaw in it that makes me cringe at what could have been.

But that didn’t quite cover all that I felt was wrong. I don’t know to whom I can attribute this idea, because it certainly did not spring full-formed from my own head, but one of the main things missing from modern day U2 is the tension.

U2 has always been a bunch of devout Christians, an oddity of a group composed of two Protestants and two Catholics hailing from Ireland. Their convictions have always filtered into their music, and for the most part, I haven’t minded that much. Their faith gave them inspiration for a lot of their best work, because they could sing about faith and hope, but it was always contrasted with reality. War and The Joshua Tree were albums about hope and peace, but always shadowed with war. The Joshua Tree (and Rattle and Hum) was a musical tour through America, even as they wrote songs decrying America’s involvement in Latin America and love affair with guns and war. Just as The Joshua Tree was dark but joyful at the end, Achtung Baby was dark and cynical, through and through. Those songs were written after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uncertainty that following, during the failure of The Edge’s marriage, and came as U2 was trying to move away their previous personas. How they could reconcile their faith and their belief in God’s love for mankind with what they see all around them? How could they be crazy rock stars, doing what rock stars do, and still be good enough to be saved?

Now, however, that tension is gone. It seems that during the past three albums, they are no longer concerned about their salvation. They’ve got it figured out, and life is roses now. How long has it been since they’re written a song that could be considered dark? Not since Please, from Pop in ’97. Since then, it’s been Beautiful Days and Magnificent, or irrelevance like Elevation and Vertigo and Get On Your Boots. It’s been happiness or playfulness, and frankly its boring. The best songs on NLOTH are “ruined” by their overt religious nature — U2 is turning into a barely veiled Christian rock band. “Unknown Caller” and “Moment of Surrender” are filled with religious language, while other songs approach it more subtly, but it’s more pervasive than ever before.

In summary, U2 always claims to be trying to mix it up, to reinvent themselves, but I don’t there’s any reinvention left in them, unless, perhaps, they decide to become a hip-hop or death metal group. At the current moment, all they are doing is ruining their reputation. Right now, the bulk of their work has been memorable and influential, but if they keep it up, they’ll start to tilt the scales out of favor.

One of the things that I do miss about Champaign is the radio station, WPGU. A few years before I left, they switched over from a Clear Channel – like format to a more open, independent format. It was great! Instead of samey, cookie cutter corporate rock, they played a lot of indie stuff that you wouldn’t normally hear. I didn’t always like it, but I appreciated the diversity and enjoyed the respite from having focus-group-tested crap rock forced down my throat.

I haven’t had quite the same amount of luck in the Bay Area, surprisingly enough. For the most part, I’m listening to the local NPR station or Live 105, an corporate alternative rock station in the area. It tends to play a little bit too much nu metal for my taste and lots of commercials, but it has a suitably stupid and wacky morning show and plays some cross section of music that I like. When I first arrived, I spent a lot of time seeking on the radio dial, trying to find a good radio station. And one day, I found one! It was playing a bunch of generic indie stuff, which doesn’t really sound like a compliment, but I was happy to find a station playing interesting stuff that I hadn’t heard before. I could tell it was a low powered station, because it barely lasted during my commute in to work. But stupidly, I changed the station before setting it to memory, and when I tried to find it again all I got was static.

About a week later, I managed to find it again, and I quickly set it to memory, where it’s become a nice listen for my commute. The thing is, I couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from, because (a) there were never any commercials or DJ’s, and (b) there were no ‘official’ radio stations playing at that frequency, and more than one ‘unofficial’ radio station playing near that portion of the dial. I began to wonder, what sort of cool people ran this radio station, that their musical interests were so varied and interesting. And eventually, I found out. Teenagers. High school kids, to be specific. Saint Francis Prep School students, to be even more specific. On the way home from work, the music ended and the DJ’s came on…and they were two kids talking about prom. Of course, these were indie hipster kids, so they were talking about going to prom in a sort of detached ironic way, rather than being excited about it, but still. High schoolers.

This is sort of embarrassing. You might say that taste in music is age independent, but it’s sort of jarring to find out that I am head bobbing in unison with kids half my age. It’s like suddenly noticing that all the commercials for your favorite television show are aimed at tweens. Or heading out to the theater for the movie you’ve been waiting the whole year for, and finding out that you’re in line with a bunch of 9th graders. There’s a cultural divide, damnit, and one of our generations is crossing the line here!

However, this rant is not even the point of this post. The other day, I was driving to work, listening to KSFH, and I hear a song come on that really caught my ear, partially because it was good, partially because I could recognize neither the song nor the artist. A moment of action was needed. There were no commercials and no breaks, so I couldn’t wait for the DJ to come back on and tell me what songs they played. This wasn’t Clear Channel, so I couldn’t count on them playing the song again anytime soon. I could tell the song was winding down, so I couldn’t try and pull out my phone and start up Shazam (which worked, by the way, when I played it later). So, I was down to my last option — remembering choice lyrics and using Google as soon as I could, before I could forget them. The important part of such actions is that you have to think of something memorable and exactly right. Luckily, the start and the end of the song are both quiet, musically, and have a memorable line. I was coming up on a red light, so I quickly thumbed the line into Google on my phone and got a response. Maximo Park’s ‘Going Missing’. I love The Internet.

Later in the day, I tried to hit up Rhapsody to hear the song again. To my dismay, Rhapsody doesn’t carry that song, which is pretty much a rarity these days. I was forced to use YouTube to listen to the song. Now, there is a lot of music out on YouTube, but I feel wrong using YouTube to listen to music….it’s like cleaning the earwax out of your ears with a pencil. Sure, it works, but that’s not its intended purpose. Which brings me to my other realization — I am so used to an on-demand world, I’m actually annoyed when I can’t get information or media immediately, preferably streaming. I can only imagine what it will be like in the future, when things like MIT’s Sixth Sense come to fruition — how will people act when the Hive Mind goes down?

Does this post have a point? Not really. That’s why it’s got the random tag. Basically, if I think about any one subject for more than some threshold amount of brain cycles, there’s a decent chance that it will end up on the web page. But anyways, here’s the song. One other reason I don’t like using YouTube to listen to music by watching music videos is that it’s harder to separate the music from the slickly-produced image of the band, so my impression gets clouded. Which sorta happens here…the lead singer looks like he’s trying a little bit too hard. But whatever, here’s the video:

And to understand the “Giant Head” thing, you have to see this :

Finally, some music. I really like the concept of They Might Be Giants. I love that they exist. But I’ve found that I really only like one or two tracks per album. But I do like this song off their latest album.

They Might Be Giants, Climbing the Walls, from the album “The Else”.

Next, a song that gets in my head everytime it’s on the radio.

Feist, 1234, from the album “The Reminder”.

Another one of my favorite Ed Helm’s bits. Fans of potty humor, rejoice!!

Also, another song.

Margot and the Nuclear So And So’s, Skeleton Key, from the album “The Dust of Retreat”.

Also, here is a track for you to listen to. You’ll need the Rhapsody web plug-in, which will install upon click. Even if you don’t have a subscription to Rhapsody, you’ll still be able to get 25 free song listens/month. So check it out.

Clem Snide, “Fill Me With Your Light”, from the album “End of Love”