The year 2000 was the turn of a millennium. Well, technically it wasn’t, but settle down pedants! And to celebrate what did the first year of this milestone show in the music world? Well nu-metal had its commercial high (hey, sod off, the Deftones’ White Pony is still great. I won’t apologise for the rest), we saw two of the most important works in both commercial rap (Stankonia and The Marshall Mathers LP) and Post Rock (Ágætis Byrjun and Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven) and Radiohead dealt with it by making one of the sharpest left turns in popular music.
And in the midst of this ever shifting, diverse musical climate there was U2 going through another reinvention. With the lack of sales for both Pop and the PopMart tour, U2 waited and planned for three whole years before releasing another record. And when All That You Can’t Leave Behind was released the U2 machine dealt with it in typical overreaction mode, calling it the back to basics after the excesses and incompleteness of Pop, a return to their original sound with a stripped down approach with which Bono’s claimed U2 were here to “reapply for the job of best band in the world.”
This is of course only somewhat true. The songs are indeed back to basics, almost fundamentally so, with a greater focus on guitars and ABABACB structures up the wazoo. But this was not, despite Eno and Lanois at the helm, a return to an original sound, as no U2 album before All That You Can’t Leave Behind (ATYCLB) had sounded like it. It was a mix of the last twenty years of the band’s career – electronics here, ambient there, American gospel other places – with the techniques and sounds coming from late 90’s/early 00’s rock scene acting as a good base. In fact, ATYCLB closest cousin would be PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Both were coming off somewhat less acclaimed, Flood produced, electronic based albums (though Is This Desire? is likely Harvey’s best album and we have already established how Pop is overlooked), both dealt with it by putting an emphasis on bright, alternative rock sounds, and both have in some ways love letters to New York a year before that would become very much in demand.
If it’s anything like The Joshua Tree it is that the record is very front loaded; all the songs that people know and love from this album come from the first half. Unfortunately, the deep cuts from ATYCLB are not as ultimately satisfying as that from The Joshua Tree (although not the complete 180 that I was afraid of), but the high moments are just such great works of pop-rock that it still ends up one of my favourites as a result.
And the highs arrive early in typical U2 album opener greatness with “Beautiful Day.” When listening to ATYCLB straight after the outright hopelessness of Pop’s ending, this sound comes to as both light relief and a true palette cleanser. From the opening synths that are as much of a declaration of intent as the rumbles of “Zoo Station,” the Edge’s light arpeggios and backing vocals feels though they are floating (or “blooming” as the lyrics would imply), before the chorus erupts into a sound so grand it is been used in a thousand football promotions since. The track is upbeat, but it still has tinges of the despondency of Pop with the idea that this person has no destination, but that she is still happy with what she has. The idea of movement, being stuck and finding a place seeps through the record, right down to the front cover.
For another clear example, take the next track on ATYCLB and my personal favourite “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”. Other people’s comparisons to Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” (which I can’t really hear apart from the piano) only help to accentuate the tracks soulfulness, though it is clearly going for an extension of the gospel sounds in “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, particularly highlighted when the choral voices start to come to the forefront. After years of just considering it an incredibly effective piece of inspiratio-pop, the lyrics take a quite a turn when learning only recently that this song was written in the wake of Michael Hutchence’s death, wherein the lyrics take the turn of the desperate and harsh words that those who have lost someone to suicide wish they could say as some kind of plea. But even if you don’t know that, the song is still great, one where the anthemic qualities of U2’s music also really work for the nature of the lyrics.
“Elevation” is the closest thing this album gets to a Achtung Baby sounding track. This is mainly down to the strange industrial sounds and incredibly complex playingcoming from the Edge, along with the almost industrial tone of Mullen’s snares and the sound effects that give the impression of a deep sea dive. The processed voices in the bridge could have even come from the spacier sounds of Original Soundtrack 1, which would be befitting the lyrics of the song, moving so much from the highest highs to the lowest lows that you could accuse it of having a bi-polar emotional state. A great tracks, even if the Mole/hole/soul repetitions are signs of some of the stupider lyrics that plague plenty of later U2 lyrics.
Another triumphant sounding song, and continuing the run of greatness, is “Walk On,” whose lyrics seem so crucial to the album so as to have named the whole album from one of them (aside from Zooropa’s title track, U2 had not really been named from a lyric before). Written for Aung San Suu Kyi academic/NLD chairperson who had been under house arrest for a decade – and who wouldn’t be released until another ten years after this record’s release – this continues both the strange synth and choral sounds, epic gospel-like choruses and also bringing a prominent acoustic guitar that gives room for Clayton’s bass rolling bass to be heard.
Even though we have already passed all the songs that U2 released as single, the series of unbridled quality still keeps going with “Kite.” Punctuating by a strange circling combination of string loop and slide guitar, that and Mullen’s light drums works as almost the perfect manifestation of the central metaphor of the out of control kite. As a symbol it is quite simple, but it is quite befitting of the song, which takes its outro to seemingly berate the more cryptic ideas of Pop, and also one also from the point of view of a narrator unsure of their own position in people’s lives.
The next two songs are strange in how unlike the rest of All That You Can’t Leave Behind they are. The hip hop-like drums and guitar licks of the introduction call to mind something from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and the bouncy bass from Clayton really propels the track. Meanwhile Bono’s vocals, instead of being on the bravado mode it is on a lot of the record (barring a fair amount of the previous track) seems unable to reach the epic qualities it wants to in the vocals. But the shot voice that Bono was singing in only helps to bring out a more vulnerable quality of this love song (to Ali Hewson) along with the light keyboard prancing around in the background.
Speaking of prancing, “Wild Honey” has the kind of tone that could accompany footage of two people frolicking arounds in the forests. A Rubber Soul era Beatle’s track seems to have infiltrated this U2 album (with Van Morrison thrown in there for good measure), with the kind of harmonies, acoustic guitar led playfulness that those comparisons come with. Not an album highlight, but definitely a light-hearted number that changes the pace. It was also in Vanilla Sky. So, yeah, there’s that too.
Neither of these two previous songs seem to really follow the themes that the album was, but they are pleasant enough detours. Unfortunately, the path we return to also sees with it a certain change in quality. I know how saying you don’t like peace on Earth sounds out of context, but this “Peace on Earth” is one of the moments where the more cloying tones of All That You Can’t Leave Behind become a little intolerable. Which is a shame, because there are things to like about the track, specifically the Eastern music harmonies that are really different to be hearing in a U2 record, and there is definitely an element of bitterness that leak through the more “universal” tones, which is certainly befitting the tone of other IRA bombing songs U2 have penned. Unfortunately, the ideas don’t mesh together amazingly, and the search for a sing along chorus has neither the emotional bite of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” nor the desperation of “Please”.
And like the previous track, “When I Look at the World” also suffers from treading territory that U2 had already covered better. The issue of tackling faith was so thoroughly explored in Pop that with wilting, whining synths in the background it just makes this exploration seem kind of lightweight. Here Bono’s vocal again sound shot, only to a lesser effect than previously, and although there is some great stuff from Mullen’s drums, without the lyrics pushing the track along the guitars can sound a little overwrought.
But the most overwrought track by far is “New York”. This is the most shame because the music behind here is this unique brooding piece with echoing tambourines and drum machines, dark synths and unstable guitars that erupt towards the end. The Reedish platform for lyrical dexterity that unfortunately Bono doesn’t grasp, with lines like “Irish, Italians, Jews and Hispanics/Religious nuts, political fanatics in the stew/Happily not like me and you/That’s where I lost you”. I think this is meant to be a tribute to the city, but I’m honestly not sure.
Thankfully the end to the album steps up in quality, Continuing with the Lou Reed like feel but with a sombre, meditative feel. That meditative descriptive is not one I normally use, but here I think it is a appropriate, with the light guitar and bass interplay locking with the synths to create a really weightless mood (spacey enough that the guitar begins to sound like a Theremin). Here the more general lyrics also work (except when Bono has to explain the central metaphor), with the story of Grace helping to bring to themes of the album (with “grace” being mentioned at the start with “Beautiful Day”) to a truly befitting finale…
Originally. Most copies now end with “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, a song originally composed for The Million Dollar Hotel (which with enough time I would have loved to cover). This actually isn’t too bad, as the tone keeps with the sober feel that the last third of U2 records usually end with, and the electronic piano really works well with the brush-sounding drums. But still, in streaming placements this would work better as a penultimate track.
With hindsight, just past on the fifteenth anniversary of its release, we can see All That You Can’t Leave Behind as carrying the seeds of what would be the worst of U2’s 2000’s; simplifying things down to the points of ridiculousness, strange lyrical choices, and a sense of wanting things to be “perfect” pop so much that they forget that no one listens to music just to hear perfection. But even though there a less stellar moments in the latter half of this album, the first half is such an amazing display of rock, pop and everything that the band had delved into from Unforgettable Fire onwards that it makes up for those moments in spades.
And it definitely worked for U2. The huge commercial sales and critical acclaim gave sign that this new direction was one that people were latching onto. So they thought they would try it again. Tomorrow we will go round dismantling it…
U2 Album Rankings
- Achtung Baby
- Zooropa
- Joshua Tree
- The Unforgettable Fire
- Pop
- All that You Can’t Leave Behind
- War
- Original Soundtracks 1
- Boy
- October
- Rattle and Hum