Battle-Fatigued

War Island 2.5 stars

Rock music has evil charms, especially when it’s wrapped up in video. This can lead to songs like “New Year’s Day” creeping up and clawing its way into your life when, in reality, it’s not that strong.

The video link did make it a minor hit though, and I bet there are thousands of U2 fans out there right now looking for a horse and snowshoes; Greenland can expect a tourist boom.

Looking through War, it’s not difficult to assess that “Two Hearts Beat As One” will be the next single and, given the Eskimo treatment, that it too shall be a minor hit. If this hit-picking sounds rather dejected at root, that’s because all this chart-processing of U2 is, quite obviously, a million miles away from the true spirit of the band.

“Innocence,” “naivety,” “religion!” — these words might all be cliches when used alongside U2 but when they are blended with the above kind of manufacturing, they become downright worrying, not to mention gauche.

“New Year’s Day” and “Two Hearts Beat as One” — a straighter song for a hit, rocky but with a clincher of a chorus — are by far the strongest tracks on War. For the remainder, they are a (dejected sounding) mixture of the incomplete, the experimental (in the simplest sense) and the plain sub-standard.

Worst of all (and it hurts me saying it, these are nice fellas) the two chart contenders are chart contenders because, unlike the rest of War, they show that U2 still have some muscle.

War suggests a tired U2, a U2 that perhaps hasn’t quite sorted out the variances between live and recorded rock music; what is needed in each genre. You can’t help feeling that the U2 of War is for the most part battle-fatigued and only able to pull the creative finger out when a chart sign flashes up.

There’s little meat here, it’s all previously gone-over bone. Gone is the strident power of “I Will Follow” and “Gloria” to be replaced by a shuffling noise, witnessed in “Seconds” and “The Refugee,” that is clearly some components of the band acting at half-cock. The “U2 audience” will love it, and you can’t help again suspecting that its the size of that audience that permits U2 this kind of Seventies luxury. It’s called studio-doodling, and it’s to be found also (I believe) on the Bunnymen’s Porcupine.

War lacks assertiveness – fatal, when you think of what U2 are about (faith, hope, and clarity). It’s signal when you look at the number of tracks that turn in on themselves, express inner subversive doubts that simply whip the legs away from what-U2-are-about.

U2 need now to surprise their vast audience. War is too straightforward, too literal; that you can write a song called “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and fail to (never mind shock) provoke the listener at all is a sign that custard pies need throwing in your audience’s (and your lyricist’s) face soonish.

The whole aura of War, and one that U2 are aware of, is of the group way out in space supported by some mixture of religious ecstasy and (just like a film!) the-constant-downer-that-is-Life. That ghastly Edge solo in “New Year’s Day” sums this up well; it’s a little white lie to your audience, it needs those snowshoes to back it up. This isn’t U2.

Not all bad: I can see them returning to form, and that doodling/messing around with your music is sometimes a healthy, recuperative thing. But, being a poet of sorts and not given to the kind of lateral thinking that sees Bono support Poland and God and All Mankind, I can’t prevent myself thinking that the participative pun in the U2 moniker is going to turn out to be the sneaky root of their doom.

If their next opus is called And Peace, I swear I’ll scream.

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