They’ve tried everything, from reaffirming their experimental credentials on No Line on the Horizon to trying to play 21st-century pop at its own game – AutoTune on the vocals, hitmaker Ryan Tedder in the producer’s chair, a mooted but unrealised collaboration with David Guetta, a doomed attempt to engage with the era’s new means of distribution in their disastrous hook-up with Apple – without ever really recapturing the success or the spirit of their late 80s/early 90s imperial phase. If CSNY could get Ohio in the US chart within weeks of the Kent State shootings it commemorated – in 1970, when getting a single in the charts involved actually pressing records, distributing them to stores and servicing radio stations – then there seems no reason why artists can’t put the faster processes of the streaming era to use in that way: there’s something faintly depressing about the fact that it’s currently the province of old lags such as Springsteen and U2. The latter informs the EP’s lead track, American Obituary, on which U2 sound more righteously angry than they have in years, both in the lyrics, which have a confrontational man-the-barricades tone seldom heard in U2’s work since the era of War – “America will rise against the people of the lie … the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power” – and musically: a stew of distorted guitar, growling bass and siren-invoking electronics.
Author: exy
Published at: 2026-02-18 21:20:27
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