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How, then, are we supposed to their thirteenth studio album, ‘No Line On The Horizon’? Well, let’s look at the statistics again and see what we find. Their first album in five years, their seventh to feature production from Brian Eno, five different formats (including a magazine format: an advertorial, a manifesto or a religious pamphlet?), eleven new compositions and a running time of just under 54 minutes. These, at least, we can take as truths.
This time round though, U2 seem less interested in statements of subjective truth, a la “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, or in the questioning of objective truth found on ‘Achtung Baby’, and it’s certainly being promoted as one of the vaguest U2 albums yet. Bono’s spoken of his attempts to create characters to deliver the songs rather than relying on the first person, and the sedate nature of tracks like “Moment Of Surrender” attempt to avoid the obvious. But for far too much of the album, U2 don’t even sound like they’re on autopilot – they just don’t sound like they even turned up to the studio. The nauseatingly leaden lead single “Get on Your Boots” is a patronisingly contrived attempt to marry White Stripes fuzz to their standard arena stylings that sounds not like the work of four flesh-and-blood beings but a room full of marketing executives, pie charts in hand (or, considering how ham-fisted that chorus is, just a roomful of pies and distortion pedals).
And that’s why U2 exist only in statistics now – there’s no realit
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Review by Mark Corcoran-Lettice
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