Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1

Score: 82 out of 100

There’s a strange conundrum in rock and roll: the bigger you get, the more freedom you earn, but the fewer risks you take. One would think that chart-topping artists would take advantage of their artistic freedom, but in general, just the opposite is true. Superstars become so obsessed with staying at the top that the risk of failure outweighs the desire for new expression. Happily, U2 is one of the few bands willing to experiment.

Of course, this is not a U2 album per se. For Original Soundtracks I, the four members of U2 have teamed with producer-musician Brian Eno to form Passengers, and the result owes more to Eno’s solo and ambient work than to U2’s rock ‘n’ roll expressionism. That said, the U2 influence and Bono’s voice do come through, making this an album fans will want to investigate, even if it is never formally considered part of the band’s catalog. The concept is that each track is the soundtrack to an obscure film. The work of filmmakers like John Leng, Wim Wenders, and Bill Carter are represented, the latter in one of the album’s standout tracks, “Miss Sarajevo.” Carter’s film, which documents a mid-war beauty contest in the former Yugoslavia, inspires fascinating lyrics that are sung by Bono, who eventually gives way to Luciano Pavarotti, whose soaring vocals lend the song even greater majesty.

Tracks like “A Different Kind of Blue” and “Beach Sequence” are evocative with few words, while the rapped lyrics to “Elvis Ate America” (based on the Jeff Koons short) provide an otherwise serious album with a genuinely hilarious moment. Bono’s love of the King and his imagery is well-documented, and here, his potshots and cliches seemingly off the cuff are wickedly funny. “White trash/The Memphis Flash/Didn’t smoke hash/Would have been a sissy without Johnny Cash,” he informs us, later adding other insights into Elvis’s love of vanilla ice cream, girls of fourteen, and shootin’ TVs.

Original Soundtracks 1 is not the “next” U2 album. That is said to be a straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll affair due out sometime next year. But as a momentary diversion from one of the biggest bands in the world, it is a worthwhile breath of fresh artistic air.

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