Time was, the recipe for a superstar artist to create a Big Event Album was well known—a few teaser ads in the music mags, a lead single for radio, some late-night talk show appearances, then sit back and watch the fans line up at the record store on release day. But now that basically every entity in that sentence has been culturally marginalized, and the propeller churn of social media refuses to tolerate slow-burn marketing, the best—and, perhaps, only—way to get everyone talking about your record at once is to release it with no warning. U2 being U2, they’ve taken that strategy one step over the line into indisputably queasy territory, aligning with their old friends Apple to insert their new album, Songs of Innocence, into all of our libraries without consent. By updating the old Columbia House Record Club scam to the digital age, U2 and their Cupertino buddies have created a new avenue of opt-out cultural transmission, removing even the miniscule effort it takes to go to a website and click “Download.”
That U2 would willingly play corporate house band at a watch announcement to achieve this rollout in 2014 surprises exactly nobody; the album release was even framed by Bono himself as the 10th-anniversary celebration of a commercial. But the insistent mode of distribution says a lot about the band’s addiction to attention in their 38th year. “Part of the DNA of this band has always been the desire to get our music to as many people as possible,” Bono wrote, and after the commercial squib of 2009’s gloomy No Line on the Horizon, everything about Songs of Innocence seems desperate to be the global, cultural “experience” fix U2 needs to survive, even if it means giving away the album for “free.”
Accordingly, the music itself aims for a one-size-fits-all, vaguely inspirational tone, with a lean approach to details despite the press kit assertion that it’s all “very, very personal.” So a song about Bono meeting his wife is given the non-committal title of “Song for Someone”, and a song called “The Troubles” isn’t a callback to the prolonged Northern Ireland conflict that inspired their first great song, but a bunch of self-pitying platitudes (which uses guest Lykke Li to mimic adult-contempo Duran Duran hit “Come Undone”). Even Bono’s opening love letter to Joey Ramone is only given specificity by the title’s parenthetical, a generic “last night a [fill-in-the-blank] changed my life” tale that could be adapted to the idol of your choosing. It’s all emotional content left intentionally formless, vaingloriously hoping to fit around the experiences of millions.
Songs of Innocence also continues a decade-long trend of U2 showing little interest in re-examining themselves as a band or as pop stars, the approach that sustained them artistically throughout the '90s. Despite jettisoning their Eno/Lanois/Lillywhite comfort zone in favor of Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, and a host of other moderately intriguing producers, Songs of Innocence is perhaps the album where U2 most self-consciously plays itself—or more distressingly, risk causing a temporal paradox by swiping moves from mantle-carriers Arcade Fire and Coldplay, akin to time traveling to the future and sleeping with your own grandchild.
A few promisingly weird moments, such as the eerily synthetic Beach Boys chant at the start of “California (There Is No End to Love)” or the breathy rhythms of “Raised By Wolves”, are quickly diluted by stock verse/chorus structures. The watery disco-punk beats of “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now” and “Volcano” are thin gruel for a band that once seemed aware of current pop trends, however ill-advised the attempts were to engage with them. Only “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight” manages to feel fresh from start to finish, with burbling synths and pillowy strings occasionally disrupted by the Edge at his fuzziest-sounding. Elsewhere, there seems to be barely any resistance to the gravity of doing what a U2 song is supposed to do and little else.
That gravity has a name, and it’s four letters long, and at this point even those letters are wearing sunglasses. The two brief moments where Bono drops his global-rock-ambassador persona—the deranged, filtered first note of the “Raised by Wolves” chorus, the brief return of the “Lemon” falsetto on “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight”—are jarring enough to expose just how overblown his crooning is on Songs of Innocence. While the album’s liner notes contain a moving, train-of-thought reflection on a childhood made up of witnessing car bombings and sneaking into Ramones shows, almost none of that insight makes it into the actual songs, which are a celebration of self-absorption: “You are rock and roll” quickly amended to “You and I are rock and roll.”
Perhaps the upcoming companion album, inevitably named Songs of Experience, will contain all the darker, cynical stuff from these sessions. Regardless, U2 have already squandered any remaining integrity to invent this needy, invasive breed of the Big Event Album, an Album that lacks any kind of artistic statement to deter from the overwhelming Brandiness. Where Beyoncé used her iTunes sneak attack late last year to make a bold pop proclamation of sexuality and feminism, U2 have used an even more audacious release platform to wave their arms and simply say, “Hey! Everybody! We’re still here!” Bono may have self-deprecatingly described Songs of Innocence as “the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys...in your junk mail,” but it’s not even that interesting—it’s just a blank message.
