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Title: An Excellent Addition to a Fine Body of Work
Review: This album is neither their best, nor is it even close to being groundbreaking. Instead it is an incredibly solid chapter in the larger context of their work, as well as a necessary musical regression into their own past explorations of what constitutes the fractured archetypes of rock and roll. What they have created through this exploration is a fascinating pastiche that is far more interesting, in this last year of the 20th century, than their past attempt, articulated in the diasastrous Rattle and Hum (their one true abysmal failure), to make sense of the competing discourses of their sources of musical inspiration. U2 have succeeded in sounding original by really doing nothing original, and that is something that is much harder to do than one would imagine. We are living in a sorry age of music when a merely decent song like "Beautiful Day" sounds, when it erupts from the pap that is normally played on the radio, as if it were delivered by the gods.
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