U2 are simultaneously the most overrated and the most underrated band in the world.
They are overrated by the many superfans who think they’re the best band ever (factually incorrect; I know who that band is) but they are underrated by the cool kids who write them off as a middle-of-the-road, middlebrow frippery for financial consultants (hey cool kids, financial consultants need music too!).
What U2 actually represent gets lost in that. U2 came from the fringes and were always interested in the fringes (they used David Wojnarowicz artwork on the cover of One, for Bono’s sake!) but they were very big and never cool. Nowadays, of course, nobody is big in that way any more and nobody cares about cool.
Cool is for Generation X and ageing rock journalists. Nowadays the kids want authenticity and say what you will about U2, they are always entirely themselves, always authentic in their brash, infuriatingly try-hard, endlessly creative way.
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The last EP, February’s Days of Ash, seemed to reflect a sense of their changing context. It repositioned their politics from top-down globe-trotting technocracy back to dirty-fingernailed, grassroots protest alongside the rest of us (this might be my own projection but I’m happy to interview them to find out).
There was some humility and service in it. What Days of Ash did with the political, the new Easter Lily EP seems to be doing with the personal (a full-length album is coming soon).
Here they’re offering us an endearingly honest, questing record about friendship, faith, art, meaning and, appropriately for Easter, death and the possibility of rebirth. They have taken on a more euphoric register as they’ve aged.
Both the youthful moodiness of 1980s U2 and the punch-pulling irony of 1990s U2 (which I loved) have been replaced by mindful sincerity and major-key epiphanies. Musically they now feel like they are on the cusp of figuring something out, edging chord by chord towards revelation. I really like this iteration of U2.
The record starts with Song for Hal, a suitably glittery tribute to their late friend, the music producer and scene-maker Hal Willner. It’s sung by the Edge and all around him his orchestral guitars are glossed up to near musical-theatre levels. This line particularly gets me: “Did you know he is close to God who makes his old friends laugh?”
In a Life has Bono reflecting on long friendships and lifelong bonds. Scars begins with the sort of root-note Adam Clayton bassline that nobody, including Clayton, does any more, and then Bono sings “Don’t cover your scars,” to a friend who is struggling.
On most tracks here, the Edge sounds Edge-like to the extent that he’s nearly sampling himself. It’s as if it’s important for him to restate his core musical theses. This is consistent. The record is aphoristic and is filled with personal and musical mantras.
[ From 2017: Ed Power ranks U2’s albums, worst to bestOpens in new window ]
Easter Lily was released on Good Friday and the last three songs have explicitly religious titles. They’re also my favourites. Resurrection Song reframes the Edge’s cosmic riffs and Larry’s syncopated drums as Afrobeat while Bono sings about celestial love.
Easter Parade is a straightforward “song of devotion” (Bono’s own words) with an outro refrain of “Kyrie eleison”. It has a piano figure and double-vocalled refrain that evoke the now 43-year-old New Year’s Day (again, a band restating a thesis). Lyrically, Bono revels in the beauty of the world, mortality and the relative smallness of his existence. “Something in me died but I was no longer afraid,” he sings.
My favourite track is COEXIST (I will Bless the Lord at all Times?). It’s the most surprising, least explicitly U2-like song here (though in fairness they’ve always produced un-U2-like outliers like this). Built on some Brian Eno soundscaping, it’s a Bono-led rumination on senseless war and its effect on children and parents caught up in it.
It has a lovely, satisfying-to-sing gospel refrain (“I will bless the Lord at all times”) over a simple, shimmering synth bed and a sporadic harmoniser effect borrowed from Laurie Anderson’s O Superman. It offers no answers, just empathy and spiritual consolation. But in doing that it somehow ends up being deeply moving.
[ Love Bono or loathe him, we could all do with a little more of his sanctimonyOpens in new window ]
U2 are a weird outfit. They’re a contradictory, post-punk, Christian rock, avant-garde, capitalist, communitarian, disco pop, protest band. They should really be outsider artists. They had no business being the biggest band in the world for so long.
Lord knows what the forthcoming album will be like but, based on these two EPs, being a bit more peripheral suits them. They sound like they’re no longer worrying about their audience and its size and are instead using music to work out their own relationship with the world. Isn’t that all anyone can really do with art?
“If I sound ridiculous, I’m not done yet,” sings Bono on Resurrection Song, in defiant self-awareness. But it’s not actually that ridiculous. It’s quite beautiful … and almost, not that it matters, cool.
U2’s Easter Lily’ EP is available on all streaming platforms. The release is accompanied by an edition of the band’s e-zine, Propaganda
