Ego Better than the Real Thing

U2 No Line on the Horizon (Interscope)

Even at the grimmest moments of U2's career, like those that involved them disembarking from a giant neon lemon in half-empty stadiums or single-handedly rescuing the blues from grubby, ungrateful Americans — no matter how self-serving or misguided the effort, they could at least be relied on to carry out those efforts with true religious fervor. Their late-career un-invention, the one that saw them shucking the fascinating but commercially disastrous techno experiments of the late '90s in favor of still more ringing Edge arpeggios, was no exception. And if they were no longer interested in being the best group to fuse dance music with rock 'n' roll, at the very least they were going to be the world's greatest U2 cover band. The formula worked: All that You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, though not especially imaginative, at least succeed at shoring up some fresh rafter-shakers while adding a few more strident catchphrases to the Bono playbook.

With No Line on the Horizon, U2 have put that calculated crusading to rest in favor of making their first bona fide AOR record, which is industry shorthand for a record that has a lot of music but no songs. Predominantly a meditation on love and commitment — it's hard not to read the entire record as a deeply felt love letter from Bono to his wife — No Line meanders for nearly an hour without ever stumbling on anything like a melody. In some pockets of the pop universe this is considered brave, the noble forsaking of choruses for complicated construction. In most of the rest of the world, it's just considered boring, and by the time Bono is trying on his Salman Rushdie suit for the lamentable Mideast narrative "White as Snow," it takes true determination to soldier on. The record is agonizingly muted, the pinprick guitars and pillowy synths mostly just background for Bono's dunderheaded prose. How bad does it get? A few samples: "The stone was semi-precious/ and we were barely conscious," "I was punching in the numbers at the ATM machine," "Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady" and, worst of all, "I gotta stand up to ego/ but my ego's not really the enemy." For once, he's right: As infuriating as it could be, it was Bono's ego that fueled the band's more interesting discoveries. The problem this time is not ego. It's ennui.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)