Pleasure principle

Sensualism and sonics tart up U2's latest love fest

by Jon Garelick

You can forget some of the claims you may have heard about the new U2 album. A bold new leap into the world of dance music? Weren't U2 doing that when they issued 12-inch dance mixes from War in 1983? And what about their claims that they are once again "reinventing" themselves, that, as Bono told Ann Powers in Spin, they want to make "a music that doesn't exist yet"? Forget that, too. Pop (Island, in stores on March 4) is instantly recognizable as U2. But you knew that when the first single, "Discothèque," hit radio a few weeks back. With all the talk about U2 diving into the new electronic DJ music, to the point of hiring ambient remix master Howie B (Tricky, Björk, Massive Attack) as co-producer, what is it that hooks you on that single? The guitar riff, stupid.

Despite the bric-a-brac of electronic noise, distorted vocals, and processed guitars, this is a band still driven by the personalities of songwriters Bono and the Edge. For the most part, verse-chorus-verse rules, and the dreamscapes (or nightmares) of Howie B's recordings or Tricky's still inhabit a separate universe of disembodied beats and no hooks. Pop makes a big sound, the band go after the pleasures of the pop hook, and Bono's voice centers the music on a charismatic persona. It may not be the new world order that Bono claims the band were aspiring too, but it's U2 at their best, and that's music of a very high order indeed.

Pop is a continuation of the saga that began with Achtung Baby in 1991. That's when the band emerged from their self-imposed wanderings in the desert of existential angst and decided that, as the saying goes, Buddhas are boring. Achtung Baby showed them beginning again to live in the material world. With Flood at the helm of that album (and he's back as a producer on Pop), the band embraced all the contradictions of modern life. Recording in Berlin, they made their sound, once pristine and anthemic, into something noisy, mangled, and anthemic -- from Bono's vocals to the Edge's guitars and Larry Mullen's drums (a metallic oomph akin to the clattering of hypersonic galvanized aluminum garbage cans).

The band's ego-less spirituality always had a whiff of pretension -- after all, the message was delivered by one of the most glamorous frontmen in rock and roll. And what were all those hooks and melodies about if not sensual pleasure? The band haven't dropped their spiritual quest (if anything, it's more pronounced than ever on Pop, with at least one song addressed directly to Jesus). But now the sensual pleasure that was always part of the U2 mix is right up front. How do you stay true to the spiritual life, the band ask, when you also love a world where the goods are the gods?

Even if you care nothing about the ostensible issues the band are grappling with, the result is vivid music. From the first whooshing fade-in of "Discothèque" (the album's first track), U2 are working on an enormous soundstage. It's not merely the variety of sounds that they've harnessed but the depth and breadth of the sonic illusions they create. Just when you think a track has been packed to maximum density, Howie B and Flood reveal another substratum of bass, or they bring a new guitar sound right up to the front of the mix, in your face, with switchblade clarity. "Discothèque" begins with that left-to-right whoosh (cars on the Autobahn?) and ends with a funky "boom cha" in the lyrics, backed by a bass-and-kick-drum stomp that's worthy of Sly Stone.

Unlike some of their more ethereal electronic influences, U2 revel in the physicality of each sound -- the little guitar squiggles that tickle your left ear when Bono goes into the chorus, the broken, staticky version of the guitar hook that later lodges itself at the bass of your skull. Bono's voice splits in two -- normal sweet baritone and gravelly devilish song-speech: "You know you're chewing bubblegum/You know what that is but you still want some/'Cause you just can't get enough of that lovy-dovy stuff." It's a bubblegum verse about bubblegum gratification. And then on the final verse, Bono breaks into his heavenly falsetto, the "you" looking for love but trapped in the instant gratification of "tonight, tonight, tonight," then drifting back into the big beat of boom cha.

The first half of the album continues to build in sonic density, noise-laden verses often finding respite in dulcet guitar harmonies on the bridge. "Do You Feel Loved" begins with a shimmery guitar figure, then fast drums and a twangy ostinato followed by a snaky bass and one of Bono's medium-tempo spiritual love-ballad lyrics. On "Mofo," Larry Mullen pulls the neat trick of impersonating an ultra-fast techno beat. The tune is layered with high siren wails that seem to float up above your speakers and slightly in the distance. A snatch of guitar arpeggio floats in from Achtung Baby's "Even Better Than the Real Thing" but drifts off as the drums drop out and Bono sings, "Mother, am I still your son, you know I've waited so long for you to say so." And then he's sucked back into the beat, his calls into the sonic maelstrom answered by a kind of PJ Harvey sneering response. "If God Will Send His Angels" is the first straight ballad, the album's equivalent of Achtung Baby's "One," Bono singing over acoustic guitar, a simple heartbeat drum, and a softly shaking tambourine before the Edge comes in with one of his sweet orchestral guitar figures. The lyrics form a Mobius strip of the material and the spiritual, the ridiculous and sublime: "It's the blind leading the blond . . . It's the cops collecting for the cons. Does love light up your Christmas tree? The next minute you're blowing a fuse and the cartoon network turns into the news."

The tempo builds again with the thick guitar harmonies of "Staring at the Sun" and another obsessive lyric of spiritual transcendence. On the easy shuffle of "Last Night on Earth," living every minute to the fullest means letting everything go. With "Gone," the album reaches the anthemic heights, Bono riding a comet of guitar into the sun.

From there the album spirals downward, darker, more diffuse. Here's where you could say that trip-hop shows the greatest influence. The bleak cityscape of "Miami" gets the most Tricky-like treatment, with spare musical support -- drums and bass, random noises, sketchy synth chords, a Tricky heartbeat rhythm track, a ghostly Jane's Addiction-style vocal harmony. But unlike Tricky and his mordant recitations, Bono can't help singing the damn thing, with barely a chord in sight to hang onto. And then, with the line "Here comes that car chase," a sprawling guitar solo shoots out of the mix. The guitar solo is U2's version of a car chase, one of the cheap thrills that the song is about and that they can't deny themselves in the midst of being profound.

There are further cheap thrills in the ballad "The Playboy Mansion." "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" gets a grumbled Leonard Cohen introduction before drifting along on more-chiming guitar figures as a dissolute love ballad. "Please" addresses love in terms of social hypocrisy, making a possible reference to the "troubles" in Ireland before building to a high-powered musical climax, where social ills and individual emotions get twisted and transfigured. "Wake Up Dead Man," addressed to Jesus Christ, gets delivered in another slow moan from Bono, except for his reaching vocal on the chorus over a big Ennio Morricone spaghetti guitar riff.

I'm not convinced Pop has the indelible melodies of Achtung Baby (I don't think there's a tune as profound as "One," a pop delight as straightforward as "Mysterious Ways"). But it does share with Achtung Baby something that the quickly made Zooropa lacked: details that surprise, and that density of conception.

Of all the pop bands out there now -- and I think I'd include R.E.M. -- U2 are the last unembarrassed superstars who want to tackle issues beyond the personal and domestic. It's music about boundary-stretching in every sense. When Bono says he wants to make music that "doesn't exist yet," he's saying he wants to get beyond genre (if Zooropa was "small" in U2 terms, it's because they fell back on genre conventions, even writing a Johnny Cash tune). Eddie Vedder may bitch and moan, Pearl Jam may "quietly" release one of their commercially disappointing platinum-selling albums. But here's U2 confronting their life as a commodity, kicking off their album and the tour with an outlandish press conference, unashamed that they want to be number one, that they want to sell millions of copies of their albums and sell out arenas, that they want to change the world.

Ever since Elvis it's been typical to hear rock-and-rollers claim that they're jes' country boys ("Them folks in Hollywood won't change me none") with regional identities and loyalties, and that any success beyond that is some kind of fluke. Nirvana played for their "little tribe" and thought it would be nice to reach some of the kids like themselves in other towns; they worried that their new popularity was attracting the wrong kind of people. And that's the rock-and-roll myth now: you'll get out there and you'll play for people like yourself. Everything's tribal. But U2 are the rock-and-roll equivalent of LBJ: they want to be president of all the people. They're "regional" stars, intercontinental jet-setters actively involved in the Dublin community. While everyone else is writing short stories about domestic strife, U2 are writing novels about social forces. (Nirvana did that, too, despite themselves.) On Pop, U2 are different, and as much themselves as ever. And their greatness still thrills.