The 2009 U2 album that half the band couldn’t stand: “Not as good as we thought”
Any album U2 ever made was intended to be a new creative endeavour for them.
No one wanted to make the same version of The Joshua Tree, and even after becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, it wasn’t that hard for them to tear down everything they stood for and start making tunes that had much more to do with post-modern irony once Bono introduced ‘The Fly’ for the first time. But even when working on some of their greatest records, all of the bandmates were normally divided when it came to which songs were destined to become classics years down the line.
Because even if Bono and The Edge loved mixing things up, they are guilty of overextending themselves a lot of the time. Some of their best songs have come from them taking a chance and seeing what happens with it, but there are also tunes from Pop that would have been embarrassing for anyone else if they were even trying to make a record that would wow people. Bono had the same thing happen when he decided to start his love affair with iTunes, but it takes more than just a few shady decisions for things to not come together.
You can say a lot of things about Pop, but one thing you can’t call it is unambitious. They were trying to make a record that was trying to push the envelope for what rock and dance music could sound like, and even if they had a lot of cringy moments on the final product, No Line on the Horizon had a much more shoddy production behind it than the average rock and roll record.
The band were insisting on thinking outside the box after How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, but the idea of them trying to get back into everyone’s good graces meant they sounded a little bit too current. ‘Get On Your Boots’ was a fine song for the time, but when you look at all of the other records that the band made since 2000, this was the first time where they seemed to be catering to whatever the fans wanted.
The other records had been soft reboots of their sound, but even if ‘Vertigo’ fit in with the other tunes coming out around 2005, this was them trying to make the mindless party songs that everyone else could relate to. That’s a good market for a band like Black Eyed Peas, but when an entire album is meant to balance both the serious and playful sides of a band, you can’t be surprised when everything is a little bit flimsy.
While The Edge was the first to say that the vision for the album “doesn’t exist”, Larry Mullen Jr was a bit more blunt about the band not knowing what they were doing, saying, “[We didn’t] pull off the pop songs. It was pretty f—ing miserable. It turns out that we’re not as good as we thought we were, and things got in the way.” At the same time, you can at least say that the band learned from their mistakes to a certain degree.
They might have just found another way to piss off their audience when Songs of Innocence was unleashed upon everyone, but the fact that they had a sense of self-awareness about themselves. They could have stopped trying and made the kind of insane experiments that they thought would work, but the idea of moving on to something different and seeing where it goes was a lot more interesting for them than staying in one sound.
So while No Line on the Horizon isn’t a terrible record by any means, it did mark a bit of a change in the way that U2 looked at their albums in the modern age. Everyone was willing to push the envelope where they could, but if they were going to stretch out, they were going to need to do right by their fans first before they started making songs in a bid to get on the radio.
