No Life On the Horizon

Let’s open the case file of “Great Moments in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, shall we? A couple of weeks ago, while doing  a radio interview to promote No Line On the Horizon, Bono (he’s in some band or other… can’t think of which one) apparently called Chris Martin (for the heterosexual males in our audience, Chris Martin is the guy from Coldplay) a wanker on the air. The DJ tried to wrestle an apology out of Bono, but didn’t really get one. Which is ostensibly good because, come on… Chris Martin is a wanker. But so is Bono. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Bono and Chris Martin are engaged in some kind of Highlander-esque battle of wankerdom that will culminate in one of them beheading the other on a mountain top and becoming the Ultimate Wanker.

My cyncial side (which is about 75% of all of my sides) says that Bono was trying to drum up a little controversy to boost album sales. There was a massive media blitz to promote No Line On the Horizon before it came out, including a five night residency on Letterman and the afore-mentioned live BBC Radio interview. When you’re hustling that hard to promote a U2 album, there’s a reason. And the reason is that No Line On the Horizon is a complete meandering mess of a record.

This was touted as U2′s Big Change Album, the one where they set out to radically change their sound. Apparently, that meant hiring Brian Eno and jamming some songs into 5-Plus minute territory. No Line On the Horizon is the kind of change you make at U2′s age – a safe, calculated “change” that’s mostly in the wrong direction. There’s still The Edge’s annoyingly chimey guitar tone (although it’s buried in some of the songs), Bono’s histrionic vocal spams, and his lyrical cliches (“Only love can leave a mark like that,” he sings on “Magnificent”), which are getting lazier by the day (see all of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” if you can stand it). The only really surprising thing about No Line On the Horizon is its uniform awfulness. But even that’s not much of a stretch in my mind, because I’m one of the only people on earth who didn’t like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (I thought “Vertigo” was a pretty embarrassing song, but then I heard “I’ll Go Crazy  if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” and “Get On Your Boots”).  In fact, when I think about it, Achtung Baby is the last U2 album that I still listen to from start to finish and I only do that on occasion.

There’s some new musicality to be found on No Line, a few more keyboards and electronic noises, but it’s not compelling enough to help you forget the tossed-off lyrics – it’s almost as if Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were brought in to try and hide the fact that Bono is becoming a worse writer by the day. Not only does “Get On Your Boots,” weld the vocal melody from Elvis Costello’s far superior “Pump It Up” to the melody from that 80′s song “Wild Wild West” (who the fuck did that song? I can’t remember for the life of me. Was it Culture Club? Who cares?), it features the not-at-all-revelatory statement, “You don’t know how beautiful you are”, a line I was putting in songs back in the 9th grade. For the record, those songs have been destroyed.

“Be careful of small men/ with big ideas,” Bono warns on “Stand Up Comedy,” a song that makes me sorely miss “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, and that seems like a credible warning for someone who is going to brave a listen to No Line On the Horizon. For all its attempts to shake things up, it only reveals that U2 is incapable of the radical departure that they think this album is. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d make an acoustic blues record, or a stripped down punk album, recorded live in one take (in other words, they’d plug The Edge straight into a Marshall amp with no goodies, forbid him from playing clean, and see what he’s really made of. I suspect the answer is that he’s less than the sum of his annoying effects pedals), or… well, it doesn’t matter because they can’t do it. Take Bono’s Coldplay-baiting radio comment. It’s exactly the sort of faux-controversial comment you make when you’re incapable of being really challenging. I’ve no doubt that Bono really believes Chris Martin is a wanker and that’s kind of my point – everybody believes that Chris Martin is a wanker. Bono – and his bandmates – are buried too deep in their own innocuousness to come up with something really radically different. For instance, Bono could’ve gone on the radio and said, “Gordon Brown is a monkey-fucker” or “I’m sick of Morrissey’s bullshit and I hereby challenge him to a pistol duel at dawn,” or really anything more interesting than pointing out something that is already ingrained in the public consciousness as firmly as the absolute knowledge that Chris Martin is a wanker.

In their day, U2 was a really great pop band and there’s nothing at all wrong with being a great pop band (The Beatles, anyone?). I can understand the band’s desire to change their sound a bit, but they don’t have to sacrifice good songs to do it (again, The Beatles, anyone?). The biggest change that U2 has made between How to Dismantle a Decent Band and No Life On the Horizon is that they’ve gone from ignorably bad to actively terrible. No Line contains three of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard from U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Get On Your Boots,” and “Breathe,” which apes Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the verse and doesn’t get much better on the chorus.  Granted, I’m not the biggest U2 fan in the world (can you tell?) but there is one test that U2 should be able to pass with flying colors: my beautiful girlfriend, who can fully acknowledge and forgive both Chris Martin and Bono for their inherent wankerdom, likes both Coldplay and U2. Her take on No Line On the Horizon? “It sounds like Old People music.” I can assure you that she has no greater perjorative in her vocabulary for music (she’s much nicer than I am) and I’ve cringed with despair when she’s leveled that charge at some of my favorite acts. I used to think that only 2 things were objectively true about music: 1) everyone’s girlfriend loves Coldplay and 2) everyone’s girlfriend loves U2. Number 2 is on shaky ground at the moment.

Shortest Bollocks! Review Ever

Recently, we here at Bollocks!were accused of creating (and foisting upon an unsuspecting public) “overwrought prose.”And by “we”, I mean “me”.

So in an effort to be less overwrought (more underwrought, or just wrought, I guess), I thought I’d sum up 4:13 Dream, the new Cure album, as succinctly as possible:

This album is a fucking mess.

God Dammit, Ryan Adams

Some day, I’ll sit my grandkid(s) on my knee and tell ‘em all about a brief, shining moment in American history. Being so recent, I know it’s fresh in your memory as well.

Of course, I’m talking about the moment in our history (Gold) when Ryan Adams was actually awesome. Hold onto it as long as you can, kids, ’cause that moment is long fucking gone. And it ain’t coming back.

Adams is a dangerously prolific songwriter, which means you can expect at least one album from him pretty much every year. Last year, it was Easy Tiger, an embarassingly adult-contemporary offering that was the sort of album for which the phrase “shit sandwich” was invented.

His latest with The Cardinals is called Cardinology. You like that? See, it’s a pun on his band’s name. Fucking hell, Ryan Adams. What have you wrought this time?

To be fair, Cardinology is not as ear-splittingly awful as Easy Tiger but it also doesn’t come anywhere close to the pleasant-enough mediocrity of his three 2005 albums. It starts off with “Born into a Light,” which is Adams’ attempt at assuring you everything is gonna be just hunky  dory. How anyone can sing shit like that these days is beyond me. Look: I’m not against singing about how life is beautiful, because it often is. But asserting that everything is gonna be great is 1) way too general to mean anything and 2) patently false. There’s no possible way for everything (think about everything. Fucking everything.) to work out all right. So sing about how you think a person’s life is gonna be okay despite the fact that it sucks now or something; don’t traffic in platitudes, Ryan Adams. You fucking wrote “Cannonball Days,” although I’m starting to think it was someone else.

Overall, Cardinology commits two egregious crimes. First, most of it sounds ready to be spliced into a fucking montage on Grey’s Anatomy. Second, the parts that aren’t ready for your girlfriend’s favorite TV show sound just as bad as the adult-contemporary shit on my parents’ favorite soft-rock station. There’s nothing wrong with being mellow (Sam Cooke proves this) and it’s not as though you can’t rock as you get older (Tom Waits, Wayne Coyne, and Joe Strummer prove this). But Cardinology is lacking in vitality from start to finish. Half-distorted guitars play zippy little white-blues licks in and around Adams’ new-found pseudo-Bonoisms (he does the soaring vocal thing on this album more than anyone ever should and the real bonus is he sucks at it).  The singer-songwriter “genre” is overcrowded with this kind of shit and Ryan Adams used to be above it.

“Magick” is one of the only attempts at a straight-up rocker on the whole album and it’s two-minutes of utter shit (“You’re like a rain cloud/ if it rained mushroom clouds”). It does feature a reference to zombies, which usually goes a long way with me but the bridge is a repetition of “what comes around goes around” which is a phrase that should be banned from the earth along with the words “maverick” and “socialist.” For a better zombie song, try out Jonathan Coulton’s excellent “Re: Your Brains.” You’ll be glad you did.

Lyrically, Adams stuffs Cardinology full of some of the worst writing I’ve ever heard. This is probably a product of recording every fucking song he writes, which is really just a manifestation of seriously unchecked ego. I’ve written literally hundreds of songs in my life. As of right now, there are about three that I would play for anyone. And I’m not saying that I’m on a par with Ryan Adams as a song writer, but if Cardinology is any indication, I’m Tom fucking Waits next to “I was waiting around for someone to die/ nobody did/ but a part of me died I suppose/ from all that waiting.” Seriously, to my current and future (and past!) bandmates, if I ever write or suggest that someone sing something that stupid, I expect to be punched in the face and nutsack until I pass out.

The only song on this album that mostly avoids either being skull-numbingly boring or riot-inducingly awful is the closer “Stop,” which is actually pretty nice. Except it just makes me want to listen to “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann, a far superior songwriter to Mr. Adams. “Stop” is a good way to sum up an album like Cardinology: “If you wanna make it stop/ then stop.” So I stopped the album. Good day, Mr. Adams.

I said Good Day, Sir!