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CD REVIEW: U2’s atmospheric CD confounds expectations Steve Morley, Jun 19, 2009
U2, No Line on the Horizon
U2: No Line on the Horizon Label: Interscope Sound/Style: Forward-thinking rock
By Steve Morley United Methodist News Service
On their first album in more than four years, U2 both accommodates and confounds expectations.
The quartet has been using that one-two punch ever since completing the seven-year arc that took them from idealistic, self-styled upstarts in 1980 to international superstardom with 1987’s The Joshua Tree. The organic progression of their hard-driving yet atmospheric sound peaked with that landmark album, which featured the production team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.
No Line on the Horizon marks a first in that it features Mr. Eno and Mr. Lanois serving as producers as well as co-composers along with the band on the majority of the disc’s 11 tracks.
The creative process undertaken by the six-man collective is not unlike that of alchemy. Fiercely played bass-and-drum constructions, guitar riffs and vocalist Bono’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics are filtered through intuitive as well as highly technical processes, all with the end goal of creating a palpable but transformative sense of space and emotion.
The undulating title track wields a flesh-and-blood throb but is swathed in a hypnotic, computer-processed whirl, while a tumbling, near-arrhythmic electronic figure repeats throughout the soulful seven-and-a-half-minute lament “Moment of Surrender.”
While such tracks perhaps rely too heavily on process and manipulation to qualify as rock and roll in the most basic sense, they succeed at fusing rock’s analog past and digital present, creating a sonic analogy for the struggle of humankind against the dehumanizing effects of technology.
In “Surrender,” a character has an epiphany while standing at an automatic teller machine, verifying that he is more than a mere sequence of impulses. On “Unknown Caller,” a cellphone speaks commands to its holder, whose separation from self, if not sanity, is suggested in the darkly comic line: “I had driven to the scene of the accident/ And I sat there waiting for me.”
The band’s well-known spiritual side informs numerous tracks, most notably “White as Snow” and “Magnificent.” The former provides a calming contrast to the dense textures that pervade elsewhere, while the unadorned vocal evokes a fitting sense of purity.
With lines like “I was born to sing for you,” “Magnificent” offers an exultant act of worship, though its searing, minor-key pulse and yearning lyric underscore estrangement from the Creator. But ultimately, alienation—whether from God, self or others—proves a recurring theme on No Line on the Horizon, a work that seems as deliberate in its contradictions as in its artistic attempt to reconcile them.
U2, No Line on the Horizon
The creative process undertaken by the six-man collective is not unlike that of alchemy. Fiercely played bass-and-drum constructions, guitar riffs and vocalist Bono’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics are filtered through intuitive as well as highly technical processes, all with the end goal of creating a palpable but transformative sense of space and emotion. 
