New Lineup on the Horizon: U2 to release ‘reflective’ album next year

IF you still haven’t found what you’re looking for in the new U2 album, well, you might find it in the next which is already looming large on the horizon.

Like a long wait for a bus, and then two come along, the newer album, called Songs of Ascent will be in the shops next year.

No Line on the Horizon, the heavily marketed new offering is the first since 2004 and the band’s 12th record.

“Upon first listen, No Line on the Horizon seems as if it would be a classic grower, an album that makes sense with repeated spins, but that repetition only makes the album more elusive, revealing not that U2 went into the studio with a dense, complicated blueprint, but rather, they had no plan at all,” stated the reviewer in the much respected AllMusic website.

Influential music website Pitchfork described the foursome’s album as “rather pitiful”.

“It’s odd that the world’s most voluble one-named activist, who holds forth at will on, say, Larry King Live, seems unsure of how to express himself in a musical context. Maybe, like most rational adults, he’s lost some faith in pop or rock to transform the planet...” went the review in Spin.

In an interview in Rolling Stone, which raved in its review of the album, Bono was already flogging the next issue.

“We’re making a kind of heartbreaker, a meditative, reflective piece of work, but not indulgent,” the magazine quoted him as saying.

Bono likened the new project to jazz icon John Coltrane’s 1964 tour de force A Love Supreme — “which is to say, with that album, I almost take my shoes off to listen to it”.

The first single will be called Every Breaking Wave, a track pulled at the last minute from No Line on the Horizon.

On No Line the tax- exiled quartet spent two years on scattered sessions in five countries with four producers.

“It is now easier and more affordable to record a song than at any other time in the history of recorded music,” U2 bass player Adam Clayton told Rolling Stone.

“Unless you’re U2.”

In proclaiming the importance of composing strong hit singles, Bono inadvertently took aim at a legendary rock n’ roll forerunner by saying U2 has a meandering “Pink Floyd side” that “has to be balanced by fine songwriting”.

But the first single, Get On Your Boots, was roundly derided, and failed to make much of an impression on the charts.

Meanwhile, the band are due to confirm Irish dates at Croke Park on July 24, 25 and 27 and early August concerts at Wembley, Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium and the City Of Manchester Stadium.

The tour is expected to start at Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium at the end of June, with dates at Stade de France in Paris on July 10 and 11, then Nice, Berlin and Amsterdam before heading to Dublin for the Croke Park homecoming.