U2

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (HTDAAB)

Artificial Euphoria

Review Score:

(2/10)

There's nothing here anywhere near as memorable as the aforementioned tracks from the last album. The closest Atomic Bomb gets is the single "Vertigo", and even that sounds like an artificial euphoria - as if the band were deliberately trying to rediscover the drive of their earlier career. All of a sudden, U2 sound tired and washed-out, aping their own former glories in half-cocked anthemic hogwash like "City of Blinding Lights" and "Original of the Species", songs full of facile rhetorical tropes such as: "I want the lot of what you got/ And I want nothing that you're not".
Even the lyrics, it seems, are stuck in some Ouroboros-like circularity, devouring themselves in an orgy of self-negation. "City of Blinding Lights", for instance, opens with Bono observing cryptically, "The more you see, the less you know", and concludes later with the even more cryptic, "The more you know, the less you feel". Which leaves us... where, exactly?

The general drift this time round is more personal than political, with several songs pleading for forgiveness or reconciliation: even when, in "Love and Peace or Else", Bono asks "all your daughters of Zion, all your Abraham sons" to "lay down your guns", he actually turns out to be fretting over some romantic split, rather than the political conflict that immediately springs to mind. None of which would matter a jot, of course, if the music sparked the lyrics to life with the band's characteristic spirit and Ã©lan. But the familiar Edge arpeggios sound weary, and it's a dull U2 album indeed on which the most notable musical strategy is the flamencoid chording of "Fast Cars".

No, it simply isn't happening this time. Instead, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb just offers a new benchmark of mediocrity.

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