A typically grand gesture: U2 revisit their songbook and rediscover themselves
U2
★★★★
Songs Of Surrender
ISLAND. CD/DL/LP
FOR A BAND who’ve tended to avoid the past, U2 have turned to face it in recent years. There have, however, been certain self-imposed conditions. 2017’s The Joshua Tree revival tour sought to find the modern resonances in 30-year-old songs, and so again it proves here with this mammoth 40-track, “re-imagined” and re-recorded deep dive into their back catalogue – the idea being life-experienced perspectives on material that is sometimes more than four decades old.
Originally conceived as an audio accompaniment to the song-themed chapters in Bono’s Surrender memoir, this being U2, the project soon grew and became a “personal obsession” with erstwhile Lou Reed/Pink Floyd overseer Bob Ezrin). In fact, 11 of the tracks here differ from the ones in the book: Red Hill Mining Town instead of Bullet The Blue Sky; Stay (Far Away, So Close!), but no Mysterious Ways.
Style-wise, these new versions tend towards the acoustic and the ambient and are pared down and led by Bono and Edge. Many of the tracks feature no rhythm section at all, leaving Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. to sit them out. A beats-free Where The Streets Have No Name is cushioned on a bed of synths and reverb, while Every Breaking Wave (a song they struggled with for years before it emerged on 2014’s Songs Of Innocence) is retrofitted with Satie-like piano arpeggios and is all the more affecting in its intimacy.
It sounds like a kind of liberation...
Along the way, there are weird, but worthwhile diversions. A full band take on Songs Of Experience’s Get Out Of Your Own Way seems to take its rhythmic cues from The Zombies’ Time Of The Season, but is left purposely rough, like a busked acoustic jam. Other inclusions are even groovier – The Fly comes over like a murky Meters; Desire is dark, falsetto funk, and sounds like another band’s cover version. In fact, you’d hardly be able to tell it was U2, which is perhaps the point. On a few songs, Edge takes over the lead vocal, with his Stories For Boys (icy, atmospheric) a particular standout.
Artists rework their back catalogues for different reasons. For Taylor Swift, it’s been a way to escape contractual constraints. For Kate Bush, on 2011’s Director’s Cut, it was an exercise in correcting niggling production and arrangement choices of the past. For U2, it sounds like a kind of liberation. If their creative missteps in the past two decades have generally been caused by their twin determinations to keep up with modern pop and relentlessly pursue music that works in stadia, then here they’ve cut themselves free from all of that. Ultimately, it may be a watershed moment. By stripping it all back down, in some ways, they’re bigger.
Songs Of Surrender is out 17 March via Island
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