this is late, look you see. normally i, to be sure, try and get these "day or release" posts all gone done and dusted and published here as soon as possible after the event. circumstances, time and other things to publish mean that, alas, this is just slightly south of three weeks after the event.
so, then, another U2 album, and not a single new Apple product in sight. this means that one can, then, more or less, focus on the album - Songs Of Experience - itself, without worrying that anyone but those who have chosen to own it and hear it have done so. in theory, at the least, but we shall get to that as well go. or we will if you keep reading.
where does the deja vu element of this particular day of release come in? by taking the bus into town to get the latest U2 release off of HMV. by a strange quirk of fate i think now i have, over the last 30 years, gone into town on the bus to purchase U2 releases to an amount equal to what i did to get Frankie Goes To Hollywood releases between 1984 and 1987.
for what reason did i take the bus this time? snow. whilst i spent somewhere close to an hour scraping car windscreens (mine and my (considerably) better half's vehicles), shovelling the drive and pratting about with coarse salt, i just didn't feel confident enough to drive in it. yes, then, i am a fanny.
should for some reason your day be made better by a "selfie" that i took whilst on the bus, here you go. indeed, i am dressed reasonably smart; by my standards. this was partially to show respect for the new U2 album - which i know i have not commented on much yet but that's standard - but mostly due to another concern which i was required to address whilst there. two birds, one stone, etc.
the bus was, despite the adverse weather, not as late as it could have been in arriving me and taking me to where i needed to be. my other concern to address was done so reasonably amicably, and so off i went to the HMV store so that i may have been able to purchase Songs Of Experience as recorded and released by the band U2. who, i know, get a great deal of hate these days from some people with social media accounts. i think the response to that off of Larry the drummer out of U2 was "so you can type, great, good for you".
happily, maybe, the loud and quite vocal derision and hatred U2 appear to attract in this day and age did not preclude HMV letting the people know that they had their (U2, not HMV) new album for sale. look, here is the poster or banner display in the window. this is just about as much effort as HMV now go to in respect of promoting new music for sale.
purchasing options, as you shall surely see in the somewhat blurry image below, were 1p south of £10 for the standard CD, 1p south of £13 for the "deluxe" CD and indeed 1p south of £30 for the vinyl. as you might expect, from a practicality and general usefulness perspective i went right ahead with the middle one.
is the album any good, then? sorry but it feels like i should give some sort of comment on that aspect at some point. after much listening, and careful consideration, i would say yes it is, but it just is not quite as good as i had expected or anticipated. further words on this as we go, then.
so yeah, i picked up the "deluxe" edition, or "special" edition if that is what it is called, and went to pay. the lady at the till - perhaps the same who sold me the Morrissey release a couple of weeks earlier - commented that i seemed "rather keen" to get this record. perhaps, then, at around 11am on that cold, snowy Friday morning, i was the first to have come in and purchased it.
in my series of random bowie posts i am often found to be berating the fact that so many of Bowie's albums over the years were declared to be "his best and most important since Scary Monsters" by very lazy writers, looking for an easy description. as such, it would be wrong for me to do any such sort of thing with releases by anyone else. for comparison, then, let me be careful. in my listening experience, as it were, Songs Of Experience is the most "fluent" and flowing record they have put out since All That You Can't Leave Behind, and ostensibly has as many clear hit singles on it. whereas i quite liked How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, i suspect this is better than that one. if you say doing nothing at all would be better than ever recording No Line On The Horizon you get the idea, and unfortunately discussing the (many) merits of Songs Of Innocence gets clouded by things like how Mr Kim Kardassian, or whatever he is called, getting upset about Apple giving him the record for free.
but still, dear reader, but still. whilst the album is not what you would call "impenetrable" to understand, this is a record which the significance of is far from immediate. there are some reasons out there for this, but i do not feel like they are particularly good ones. at all.
to try and gather my thoughts on this i've read a few reviews. one or two are "professional" ones, but mostly fan reactions. i am misquoting someone here, i know, but what someone said was along the lines of this -
"the key to understanding Songs Of Experience is to know that Bono faced a major, near death experience during recording it. like how the key to understanding Achtung Baby was knowing that The Edge (beanie wearing English born guitarist in the band) was going through a divorce."
woah, there. wait just one damnedest of darned minutes. at no point whatsoever did i, or anyone else, need any "key" or prior knowledge at all to understand, or get, Achtung Baby. that was just one of the greatest records of all time, it was immediate, sunk in for what it was and has been appreciated by millions for what is on the record alone ever since.
just what is this "near death" experience of the Bono? it seems the band are keen, if not eager, to "let slip" in interviews that "something happened" - beyond and after the horrific thing where Bono on a bike got twatted by a taxi - but reluctant or hesitant to say what. although glad that Bono would, as far as we know, now be what you may call "ok", this elusive nature does the record no favours. my view - and yours may well differ - is that if someone has to take knowledge or information specific to a work of art in order to understand it - beyond their own knowledge, experience, etc - then that art has failed.
what was up with the Bono, then? no idea. some have speculated that perhaps it was a heart attack, or maybe even cancer. neither of those, however, really tally up with tales of backstage during the Joshua Tree 30th anniversary tour of this year, for the likes of Noel Gallagher have commented that U2's legendary drinking ambitions remain untempered, for a start.
alternatively, the band have suggested that the release of this record was "a year" later than planned. reasons for that would be "not wanting it" to be seen as an overt political comment on Donald Trump, and not wanting it to distract or otherwise detract from the whole celebration of The Joshua Tree.
you know, now that i look at the pricing on these pictures, perhaps my costing guide was out by £1 a time on the CD versions. but i don't think i am wrong. not sure if i am wrong or them signs on the HMV "chart / trending / new release" section are. oh well.
the three best songs on this album are - and at this stage i would say by a measurable if not excessive distance - the ones what got "made available" as theoretical singles. they are, then, The Blackout, You're The Best Thing About Me and Get Out Of Your Own Way. them last two are astonishing, uplifting, entertaining and high impact songs. also, totally misleading about how the remainder of the record sounds.
an advantage of this being late is being able to see what it, Songs Of Experience, gone done in the albums chart after being out for a week. to this, it entered the chart at number 5, behind the very heavily promoted Sam Smith Record (distressingly his face was on the bag i paid HMV 5p for), and others that are either selling well for Christmas or, in the case of number 2, the Official Chart company are adamant will remain in the chart at all times, no matter what special rules they must make up on the fly for it to do so.
no, the remainder of the album outside of them three songs is not bad. far from it, actually. it's just not really a lot like those tracks, and so the record as a whole does not quite sound like you had expected, indeed in my case as had hoped for.
any particular highlights? the quasi bookends, with the latter not being the end, of Love Is All We Have Left and Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way. for those who really, really liked U2 and fell out with them for whatever reason (possibly, bizarrely, tax purposes), these two are a reminder of what drew so many of us to the band at the first or second time of asking.
or maybe not. i think U2 are resigned to the fact that they probably won't attract many or any new fans at all. at this stage, i expect they carry on because they have something to say, and they want it to be heard. otherwise, well, why do it?
around the time of Songs Of Innocence, when they were doing interviews, mostly the conversations and questions focused on the "backlash" about giving the record away to all and sundry what had Apple accounts. quite strange, really. Apple approached U2 and offered them a whole load of money for the album, Apple distributed the album as they saw fit and yet the band got "blamed" for it.
well, anyway. from one of the interviews, the band highlighted a review they liked. it was, from what i can remember, in an Irish newspaper. the reviewer asked "why do this? just tour the greatest hits every five years or so and feel the love for them". this, you would think, would be too easy. caricatures and exaggerated ideas of what U2 are exist today, so it is also easy to forget that the band were, are, and always will be, confrontational. not just for the sake of it, either.
it might turn out that this is the last ever U2 record. that in itself would be something, for surely No Line On The Horizon in itself would have ended the career of any other band, so well done for going on beyond that. if so, well, quite a decent and respectable way to bow out. depending on just what, exactly, is going on with Bono and these major health scares will, i suspect, dictate what happens next.
overall, then, i would say my hearing of Songs Of Experience is satisfactory, but that sounds way more derogatory and critical than i would wish it to. perhaps as time unravels and there's more clarity on what exactly is going on with some of the lyrics it shall mean more than it presently does.
exactly what "legacy" this album has depends on the last two paragraphs, i suppose. unless some truly significant meaning comes out - not necessarily Bowie Blackstar in purpose, but you never know - i fear that this album, like most of the ones made today, will not be treasured or looked back on in the years to come. which is a shame, for if nothing else You're The Best Thing About Me is the first song in many, many years to - and sorry for the horrid image i create - make me want to get up and dance, and sing / scream the lyrics of.
so, well, anyway. apologies that this has all been a bit, or rather late, in particular with regards to how quickly things are disposable and old news in this era. for what it is worth, the three songs i highlighted above as being the best make, for me, the price of owning this album well and truly worth it.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment