Pop rocks
U2, Bowie, and Depeche Mode ahead
by Brett Milano
The album is called Pop, but the single is called "Discotheque." Is U2
sending out mixed musical signals? For the second season in a row the big news
is the prospect of a new U2 album, but this time it's for real, and the new
disc is set for release by Island on March 4.
The finished album is apparently quite different from the one U2 would have
put out if they'd met last month's release date. Their original goal was to
make a guitar-heavy "rock and roll" album, and it appears that was still the
plan until recently. But U2's collective interest in dance music apparently
took over late in the sessions, as they and producer Flood began remixing and
retooling the material they'd been working on. "Trip-hop" is now the word that
Bono and the Edge have used to describe the album while mentioning their
admiration for the Chemical Brothers, Tricky, and Oasis.
The "Discotheque" single is due to hit the radio on January 8. Meanwhile, two
brief samples from the album (both lifted from a Europe-only Island promo
video) started to circulate on the Internet last month. Although they were
reportedly taken off line after the band's management complained, it took me
only 20 minutes of Net surfing to find them on a Norwegian fan's page. The 20
seconds' worth of "Discotheque" I downloaded sounds more hard funk than disco,
with the Edge playing a chunky dance riff that harks back to Chic's heyday as
Bono does an eerie overdub of falsetto vocals à la "The Fly." The other
track, "Wake Up Dead Man," is more traditional U2 and a grabber even in lo-fi
computerized form. The sample is a soaring chorus hook that's answered by a
simple-but-perfect 12-string guitar part. Both clips suggest more of a
guitar-band format than advance word has indicated.
Another veteran about to release new music is David Bowie, whose
Earthling (Virgin) will appear on February 11. Bowie's material has also
previewed over the Internet, though in his case it was authorized. The single
"Telling Lies" hit the Net in September and three different mixes have been
released since then, though the song is still unavailable as a single or CD.
The song promises a more conventional dance-rock sound than the adventurous but
badly received Outside.
Singer David Gahan's well-reported misadventures have kept Depeche Mode out of
the studio for a time, and those misadventures are reported to be the topic of
the group's forthcoming single from Sire, "Barrel of a Gun." Yes, the title is
a heroin metaphor. The next Mode album is said to sport a harder technoid sound
than usual, though they've put down the guitars and returned to an all-synth
format.
A handful of long-standing alterna-rock heroes are due to show up in new
configurations next year. Having disbanded American Music Club, frontman Mark
Eitzel has hooked up with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck for his second solo effort, which
is now being recorded for Warner Bros. The two have written most of the
material together. J Mascis's next album, Year of Mondays (Reprise; due
March 25), will mark the debut of a new Dinosaur Jr line-up, including a string
quartet. Mascis's former bandmate, Lou Barlow, releases a full-length Folk
Implosion album, Dare To Be Surprised (Communion), in mid April.
The new year's first true anthem will likely arrive in the form of "The Masses
Are Asses," a killer track from L7's The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum
(Reprise, February 6). The album shows L7 in full-throttle arena-rock mode.
Also promising big noises are Offspring, whose Columbia debut, Ixnay on the
Hombre (February 4), opens with a spoken "disclaimer" by Jello Biafra.
Two of the more interesting labelmates due for new music are Morphine and
Henry Rollins, both newly signed to Dreamworks. Morphine's Like Swimming
makes no sellout moves in terms of style or production but does sport a
stronger batch of tunes than the previous album, yes. Following up the
commercial success of 1994's Weight, Rollins and company have used an
outside producer (Steven Thompson) for the first time. The new material "sounds
like the last album, only better," said Rollins when I interviewed him last
summer. "The big difference is that Melvin [Gibbs, bass] is more integrated
into the band. There's no eight-minute epics on this one, sorry to say.
Sometimes I listen back to that End of Silence-era stuff and it's all
eight minutes, nine minutes . . . my God, what were we
thinking?" The still untitled album will be out in late March.
The U2 tracks mentioned here can be heard at
http://www.sover.net/~carrieu2/u2page.html.