Nothing cures the fever and anxiety of a hangover quite like middle-of-the-road music. Sitting in a Starbucks waiting for an inevitably delayed train is the best place to listen to latter-day U2. It just settles in as the right spot for their work, commercialised and cheap and in some ways unethical as it stands against artistic independence. You don’t drop an album onto everyone’s iPhone and live to see a satisfying conclusion to such a move. But No Line on the Horizon was a different time for U2. The band had left it five years since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and looked at a future they had predicted to some extent. With No Line on the Horizon they dare to dream by staying the same. Botched sessions with Rick Rubin solidified what U2 were already doing, rather than breached their tired concept. Bono and friends claim they want to try something new, to trial a new way of recording, but never reach a point where they sound anywhere near comfortable giving in to a new style.
No Line on the Horizon was, in many ways, the beginning of the end of that classic U2 experience. As has been the trouble for U2 for some years now, the band has rarely managed to bring instrumental flavour together with lyrics of worth. They do for the title track here, The Edge riffing away on the servitude to humanity Bono paints himself with, but it’s a rarity for 2000s U2. It’s not a frustrating listen, just a disappointing one. They’ve got all the tools necessary. Bono still sounds extraordinary and his vocal strengths have hardly waned in the years to follow, but the material they deliver has, despite being the worst part of their most recent albums, done less damage to them than the irony-laden public image of Bono as a blunt force for change. Whether Bono would have the same mockery levelled at him if the U2 material of the times had been better, we can only wonder. But what becomes abundantly clear is the wheels had come off around the time they were writing No Line on the Horizon. A strong title track is not enough to carry the band through a collection of dud pop-rock riffs.
Bono gets a little too simple, a touch too stupid, on Magnificent. He finds himself looking into fires and going unnoticed by passing people. The problem isn’t so much the metaphor he weaves into the story here but the simplicity of contrast. Perhaps it’d work if the music was a little darker but U2 are, at this point in their career, beyond the point of being able to experiment with the notions of a new sound. Moment of Surrender and Unknown Caller are such vacuous, hollow pieces of work that it’s a miracle the band can salvage anything from them. But that floaty guitar riff The Edge would hammer into oblivion on the albums to follow feels like it has a last gasp of life in it here. It does, just about. A few glimmers of interest in the context of I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight but, like much of the material found in No Line on the Horizon, it all feels a touch vacant and hollow.
At best, an underwhelming and misguided piece of pop work where U2 slowly realise they’re not the mainstream anymore. They’ll always sell out stadiums, or get near enough, but the material people want is hardly going to be that of No Line on the Horizon. Bono offers some slippery, underwhelming lyrics while the rest of the band let influences from the last decade of rock and roll pull them in ways that conflict with the core of U2’s identity. They’ve lost their identity by this point and become a profile of other bands, different noises that The Edge and team wouldn’t initially need to use. But then there’s songs like Get on Your Boots that are drowned out by this desire for a new sound with the same notes, or the truly disappointing, lazy lyricism of Stand Up Comedy. How quickly No Line on the Horizon drops off is no laughing matter. At least FEZ / Being Born has the notions of emotional clarity, but it comes to a premature end. No Line on the Horizon doesn’t, though, it staggers on aimlessly and without much care for where the band were headed, a decade into a new century.
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