U2 Still Looking Despite New Sound of ‘Achtung’

More than three years since it last rattled and hummed, U2 clanks to the album racks today with a brave new sound for a clamorous new decade.

On first listening, it sounds like U2 has gone too far. With repeated exposure, the problem is that the band hasn’t gone far enough. Both the most challenging and the least consistent of the band’s albums, Achtung Baby works best when it moves furthest from the preconceptions surrounding U2, and falls flat when it attempts to straddle what has been and what could be.

For those of us who prefer wilful perversity in our rock bands to careerist calculation, Achtung Baby is exhilarating in conception. As an album with blockbuster expectations (the Irish band was arguably the most popular in the world from 1987’s The Joshua Tree through the tour documented by the following year’s Rattle and Hum), it takes its cues from an era when the greatest rockers reinvented themselves each time out, exploring uncharted territory rather than catering to audience expectations and marketing strategies.

Such risks have too rarely been taken in mainstream rock since the mid-’60s heyday of the Beatles, Stones and Dylan. While U2 obviously aspires to that level of musical magnitude, the album more specifically follows the late-’70s lead of David Bowie, who went to Berlin with Brian Eno to create the most experimental music of his career, in the same studio where U2 and co-producer Eno recorded the bulk of this.

As such, this is very much an album of its time and place. Where U2’s last two albums were specifically American in inspiration (an effusion of manifest destiny from conquering heroes after a pair of triumphant tours), Achtung Baby reflects the tumultuous transition of the city in which it was made. It’s a darker, edgier album than its predecessors, claustrophobic rather than expansive, closer to the confusion of apocalyptic upheaval than the exaltation of kingdom come.

It’s an album that demands a leap of faith, one that the band has made and which it challenges its audience to follow. With the opening of “Zoo Station,” the music practically dares the listener to come close to it — the intro unbalanced, the guitars distorted and industrial, the rhythm mechanical, the vocal processed practically beyond recognition.

“I’m ready, ready for what’s next,” chants the voice that must be Bono’s, as the backing track clangs and whirrs. “Ready for the shuffle, ready for the deal, ready to let go of the steering wheel.”

Though this is a return to thematic territory where the street has no name, the music itself is a radical departure. Where The Joshua Tree was epic and uplifting, much of Achtung Baby is down and dirty, a sonic buzz of cheap aural sensation replacing the exalted anthems of old. It’s a bracing sound, one that’s unnerving enough to topple that pedestal from underneath Bono and to insist that listeners experience the band anew. Where earlier albums explored global and spiritual concerns, Achtung Baby turns inward, penetrating the heart’s dark desires and deep secrets.

While fired by inspiration, U2 occasionally succumbs to its own failures of nerve, compromising its momentum with stylistic retreats. The worst offender is “One,” a Pavlovian crowd-pleaser of a ballad infected by “We Are the World” bloat (you can almost see the stadium-sized audience swaying with lighters held aloft).

In similar fashion, “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World” combines a melodic progression from the band’s own “Angel From Harlem” with a lyric stolen from a T-shirt (“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”), and sounds predictably tired compared with the invigorating freshness of the music surrounding it. A better compromise between the band’s adventurous impulses and its commercial tendencies is achieved through “Mysterious Ways,” where the sing-song hooks of the fail-safe hit receive a jolt from the fuzztone funk of The Edge’s guitar.

Though popular perception has made Bono U2’s focal point, Achtung Baby is most impressively The Edge’s album, his guitars drawing inspiration from the likes of the Television and Wire bands to explore new frontiers, while the rhythm section of bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. fuels his inventiveness. Particularly on “Even Better Than the Real Thing” and “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” — the two tracks co-produced by Steve Lillywhite with Eno and Daniel Lanois — there’s an urgency to the unbridled musical interplay that makes most contemporary rock sound anemic.

The dynamics of the music offer new challenges for Bono, who responds on “Zoo Station” and “The Fly” with some of the most compellingly pointed songcraft of his career, but whose signature style is elsewhere the music’s greatest limitation. He slides a little too easily into the epic sighs and breathless desire that have left him open for parody, while melodically he occasionally hedges the album’s bets against the greater risks taken by the rhythms and textures of the music.

Where The Joshua Tree was an unqualified triumph (to these ears, the best album of the ’80s), Achtung Baby is most significant as a promise of things to come. It’s a laboratory experiment of an album, more compelling as process than product, one that risks commercial payoffs this time through for greater creative dividends somewhere down the road. As such, it’s an artistic renewal for a band that refuses to become complacent, that still hasn’t found what it’s looking for.

Where U2’s last two albums were specifically American in inspiration, Achtung Baby reflects the tumultuous transition of Berlin, the city in which it was made. It’s a darker, edgier album than its predecessors.

© Austin American-Statesman, 1991.