I'll whack up u2 album reviews from different sources - some glowing, some less so, some slating an album...
The idea is for us to dissect the reviews pulling out what we think are really good points, and discussing them - looking into what we think are unfair or bad points and anything else we find interesting in the reviews and discussing those points, their context etc...
First up is a review from The Guardian of SOI.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/11/u2-songs-of-innocence-reviewFull text in case anyone can't access link:
U2: Songs of Innocence review – listenable, but not the grand return they clearly crave.
3 out of 5 stars
Even in an age in which we’ve grown accustomed to artists giving away their albums for free or suddenly unleashing them without warning, the arrival of U2’s Songs of Innocence feels slightly curious. It was announced, minutes before its release, at Apple’s Keynote Presentations: Bono and the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, indulging in some scripted “hey-why-don’t-we-do-the-show-right-here” banter so teeth-gritting it seems a miracle no one in the audience of assembled geeks tried to bludgeon themselves into insensibility with an iPad before its end. U2 and Apple – the latter footing the bill – don’t seem to have released the album so much as foisted it upon half-a-billion people: if you have an iTunes account, it is there in your “purchased” folder.
Whether this amounts to an act of great munificence, or the musical equivalent of a unsolicited email offering safe and fast penis enlargement, is a moot point: a cynical voice might read Bono waxing lyrical on U2’s website about the album winging its way unbidden to Africa and east Asia and suggest that Songs of Innocence amounts to payback for all those spam messages from Barrister Joseph Obagana and Mr Wong Du, South Korean banker, concerning million-dollar inheritances. Indeed, your attitude to the album’s arrival on your computer might depend on your attitude to U2, or at least the U2 of the past 10 years, a troubled and confused period in the band’s history. Having deconstructed their sound and image to vast success in the 90s, U2 have spent much of the intervening period looking like they can’t find the instructions to put themselves back together again. So record-breaking tours and hit singles have been interspersed with albums that band members openly criticised – Bono would subsequently claim that 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb “fucking annoys me” – and commercially underperformed, or at least commercially underperformed by U2 standards: the worldwide sales of 2009’s No Line on the Horizon slumped to a meagre 5m copies.
For all the grandiosity of its launch and Blakean title – and indeed for all the talk of it as a concept album based on the band’s Dublin childhoods – Songs of Innocence is audibly a product of that confusion. It took years to make, involving five different producers, who between them seem to have covered every base. Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton hints at dance dabbling of the kind U2 indulged in on 1997’s Pop; Declan Gaffney worked on the experimental No Line on the Horizon; Paul Epworth – who graduated from hip indie producer to chart blockbuster by way of Adele’s 21 – and Beyoncé collaborator Ryan Tedder suggest a lunge for vast commercial success; and fans of classic U2 might be reassured that Flood’s name first appeared in the credits of The Joshua Tree. You might detect a certain whiff of desperation in the fact that parts of the album sound distinctly like Coldplay – literally the first thing you hear is the kind of massed woah-oh vocals with which Chris Martin reliably rouses the world’s stadiums, while the guitar line on Every Breaking Wave carries an echo of Paradise’s melody – or, even more startling, Emile Sandé, whose Read All About It seems to have informed the tune of Song for Someone. Bono has claimed that Where You Can Reach Me Now is influenced by the Clash’s disco experiments on Sandinista!. Listening to the taut guitar line and disco drums you can just about hear what he means, but the song feels pallid and tentative, the work of a band who have had the wind knocked out of them.
Nevertheless, Songs of Innocence isn’t a bad album as such. The only person who’d agree with Cook’s suggestion that The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) amounts to “the most incredible single you’ve ever heard” is someone who hasn’t heard many singles. Detached from that excitable assessment, however, it’s actually a really good exploration of adolescence, alternately sardonic – “I’ve got music so I can exaggerate my pain,” notes Bono at one point – bullish and uneasy. The guitars crunch stridently over drums that keep threatening to resolve into a glam stomp, but never quite do, hovering somewhere more fidgety instead. Elsewhere, the best moments usually involve Danger Mouse: the lulling synth pulse of Sleep Like a Baby Tonight, and Raised By Wolves’ potent, smarting evocation of the 1974 Dublin and Mognahan bombings. Anyone who feels their sphincter involuntarily tightening at the thought of a U2 song called The Troubles might be surprised to learn that it doesn’t seem to have much to do with ethno-nationalist conflict. Presumably taking heed of the wry self-portrait in the lyrics of Every Breaking Wave – “I thought I had the captain’s voice,” he sings, “but it’s hard to listen while you preach” – Bono spends most of Songs of Innocence avoiding grandstanding in favour of personal recollection.
In his introductory piece on the U2 website, Bono refers to Songs of Innocence as the first instalment of a two-album set – “if you like Songs of Innocence,” he wrote, “stay with us for Songs of Experience, it should be ready soon enough” – which makes it sound suspiciously like an interstitial release, with an album proper, that you presumably have to pay for, to follow. That would make sense in light of the music it contains. As a free sample, it’s fine: it has its moments among the longeurs, enough of them to suggest U2 aren’t a spent force. But what Songs of Innocence isn’t is the grand return the band obviously crave. Perhaps that’s to come.