U2 – With Or Without You – Songs of Surrender Review

“Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version each song started to open up to a new authentic voice of this time, of the people we are, and particularly the singer Bono has become.” – The Edge.

Was such surrendering even needed? U2 have a lack of confidence in their original material. That would be the case for any artist living off of their best works, readapting them whenever they feel as though they are out of steam. Bono and friends head back into the rich annals of their history and contaminate their best works with rough acoustic covers that would have worked if they were B-Sides or bonus tracks back on the original releases. To form an album full of those pieces is a gift to nobody but themselves. When the powerful charms of With Or Without You have been stripped away, all that is left are the decisions made by a band trying to innovate and reinvent a track that was already a perfect release.

Still, an acoustic cover of With Or Without You is not the worst idea. It is an original piece that, fundamentally, relied on the gift of great lyrics. It also relied on the power behind them and that is stripped away with heinous reasoning. A short and not particularly sweet version of With Or Without You is, on paper, a solid idea. But The Edge’s production lets this one down, as does a lack of conviction from Bono, who steadies himself and prevents any sort of explosive, artistic high. It can be heard in his voice, the rise and rise toward the end of the track, pushed back again and again. Releasing that powerful boom would be too reminiscent of the original, better recording, and so it is stopped. In its place is a stunted, useless cover.

An equivalent experience would be heading to a karaoke bar and waiting for someone to take on With Or Without You. Bold it may be for U2 to make an album that is, at best, gearing up to be a collection of karaoke covers recorded as a way of letting The Edge work through his production stylings. What U2 will always struggle with on these tracks is whether or not it is better than the original that came before it. Pride (In the Name of Love) was no better than its original. Neither is With Or Without You. That struggle comes from attempting to adapt and recreate a song that was perfect on release. To go back to it now, decades on, under the pretence of finding new meaning in old lyrics, is a distraction tactic. No new meaning is found. Nothing has changed for the better.

But if this is how U2 want to wrap up their dwindling Songs Of… trilogy, then so be it. Those tracks are thankfully still out there in their original, better form. Long-time fans of U2 will likely use the same excuse as U2 for working on and releasing this project. There is no excuse for peddling old tracks under the guise of new meaning, when no new meaning is present. Whether that is an active failure or an accidental one for U2 as they rally around their favourite tracks of old is unknowable, but what is knowable is that these tracks are not as powerful or interesting here as they are on the albums that are still, thankfully, available.