What you cannot leave behind (All That You Can't Leave Behind - U2)

Member Name: richardandkaye

Product:	All That You Can't Leave Behind - U2
Date:	19/08/01 (93 review reads)
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What does a band do when they've conqured the world twice over? With their brand of heartfelt rock underpinned by a spirituality and conscience that - in recent years - has also embraced irony and self-deprication, U2 enter the 21st Century with their first new release since 1997's coolly-received Pop.

The new album is aptly titled All That You Can't Leave Behind, as it neatly encapsulates both the musical content of the record, and also the band's current predicament. For U2's past has caught up with them, the basic four-piece approach of their early years revisited if not exactly recaptured. No longer spotty adolescents with raw ability and burning ambition, the clash between old and new, past and present, makes All That You Can't Leave Behind their most compelling album since Achtung Baby.

Opening with the #1 single Beautiful Day, a track that's not a million miles away from the celebratory rush of their mid-80s work, U2 then glide effortlessly through a diverse range of styles. Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of might seem on paper to be another typically smart-arse exercise, yet in reality it's a soulful song (apparently stemming from the last conversation Bono had with Michael Hutchence before the INXS singer's death) with an admirably restrained production. Likewise the album's original closer Grace, and to a lesser extent Peace On Earth - the latter betraying a few Pop-esque tendencies.

New York, In A Little While and When I Look At The World are less immediate, but grow on repeated listening. Wild Honey is an intially serviceable acoustic rock strum raised to greater levels by a sublime chorus, and Walk On is swirling, classic-period U2 - to this album what Gone was to Pop.

Kite delves into the downbeat, confessional territory of Achtung Baby's more sombre moments with equally effective consequences. U2 are often at their best when they drop the facade, lower the tem
po and expose the dark soul of their music.

Elevation - the track they performed recently on their first studio Top Of The Pops appearance in almost 20 years - is a simple but joyous guitar workout, and would make a great 3rd or 4th single from All That You Can't Leave Behind. That said, singles as an entity in themselves are virtually redundant nowadays for an act such as U2, other than providing impetus for extra album sales. They will be judged upon the amount of copies the album manages to shift in comparison with previous releases, rather than the Top 40 peaks of each single. Pop yielded no fewer than five Top 15 hits, yet total sales in the UK for the album barely reached 400,000.....by some distance their worst return since their breakthrough with October in 1981.

Bono regards All That You Can't Leave Behind as a collection of eleven singles - UK bonus track The Ground Beneath Her Feet (from their gorgeous soundtrack to The Million Dollar Hotel movie) was included on the insistence of drummer Larry Mullen, and most welcomely so.

This unpretentious return to direct, 4-minute songs with few frills and little indulgence, is either a propitious omen for the band's future....or an attempt to rekindle former commercial glories. The evidence would appear to point towards the former. Ignore all pretenders to the throne...REM may have faltered, but U2 are still the kings of serious mainstream rock.

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