For decades, U2 refused to rest on the laurels of their catalogue. A rarity among groups for having kept the same lineup since their formation in 1976—Bono on lead vocals, The Edge on guitar and keyboards, Adam Clayton on bass, and Larry Mullen Jr. on drums—U2 have sold out arenas. since the 1980s. He brought new songs to huge audiences as recently as 2018.
The band did indulge in a stadium tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their breakthrough release, 1987 album “The Joshua Tree,” in 2017 and 2019. And now, U2 is looking even further back.
Their new album, “Songs of Surrender,” remakes 40 U2 songs with largely acoustic arrangements. U2 have also agreed to hold a Las Vegas residency in the fall. In a surprising change, the group will have a replacement drummer, Bram van den Berg, in place of Mullen, who has been dealing with injuries.
Bono, 62, published his memoir, “Surrender,” last fall. On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish band released a documentary on Disney+, “Bono & the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman,” along with “Songs of Surrender.”
Of the three retrospective projects, Bono’s book is by far the most vivid. “Surrender” leaps through the unlikely story of Bono and U2 in vignettes that zigzag between poetic and prosaic, devout and skeptical, privileged and conscientious, mystical and political.
The book’s messages about faith, friendship, and family are repeated in “A Sort of Homecoming.”
The documentary combines biographical interviews and snippets of Irish history, and includes two performances: a concert by Bono and the Edge with choir and strings at Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre, and a sing-along in a tavern.
“Songs of Surrender” is the project with the greatest weight. The album is anything but haphazard; the songs have been painstakingly reconsidered. Some get new lyrics: clarifying that “Bad” is about drug addiction, rewriting “Walk On” to allude to the war in Ukraine.
The album sets out to recast stadium anthems as private conversations. Bono hums as if he’s singing softly into your ear, and most of the arrangements are based on acoustic guitar or piano.
New versions of “Songs of Surrender” often remove too much. The original 1983 “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a song referring to the 1972 massacre of Irish protesters by British soldiers, evokes sirens and gunshots as Bono sounds desperate and furious. The new version, featuring a single acoustic guitar, recasts the song as something between a lullaby and a lament, sung as if it were a learned memory.
The cathartic, rising peaks of songs like “With or Without You,” “Vertigo” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” are too muted on the new versions.
The album’s restrained arrangements and in-your-face vocals offer a chance to focus on lyrics that were hidden on the original versions.
But for most of “Songs of Surrender”, less is simply less. What is transmitted is not intimacy, but distance. For U2, as for most artists, it’s better to look forward than backward.
By: Jon Pareles
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6656058, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-11 22:40:07
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