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The Lone Sharks
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Steve Winwood
Moneyland
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I'm Not There (Original Soundtrack)
Various Artists
Home Before Dark
Neil Diamond
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Toby Keith
It's A Shame About Ray (Collector's Edition)
The Lemonheads
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Otis Redding
Loaded
Wood Brothers
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U2
On Pop, it seems as though U2 had taken the handbook to ‘Having Fun With Artifice’ and applied it much to literally (and liberally) to their musical project. On Achtung Baby, the philosophy worked wonders with their image and breathed new creative life into the band. On Zooropa, the new image still held up reasonably well. With Pop, U2 push things too far. They pop.
This album is proof positive that opinions are extremely subjective, especially as they apply to specific artists. I must admit that after some reflection, I realize that this album would not seem nearly so abrasive and annoying if I didn’t already have some preconception of what this band is capable of. The problem here is that U2’s deliberate adaptation of coolness, distance, prevarication and insincerity had run its course on their previous two efforts, making this image adjustment even more stale than the ‘sincerity’ rap from which they were originally attempting to distance themselves. If Pop were a new album by, say, Donna Summer, I’d be impressed as hell, and would probably give it a much higher rating. Perhaps this is unfair, but since it’s a U2 album, it strikes me as emotionless and strident, with emphasis on form instead of content.
By no means is Pop a sloppy album. Arrangements are rich and well constructed, but also dense, with little room left for an audience to breathe them in. An overriding message attempts to fight its way through the noise, but it gets beaten back by the synthesizers and processed guitars, which fight each other for equal footing. Bono seems as though he is trying to convey a crisis in faith, and it is a topic that sits uncomfortably underneath the calculated drone of these songs. “If God Will Send His Angels,” “Staring At the Sun” and “Wake Up Dead Man” all simulate some type of communication with a higher power, but the music seems to convey that he might as well be banging his head against a wall.
The “If” songs do the best job of breaking this spell. ”If God Will Send His Angels” and “If You Wear that Velvet Dress” are less manic than the others, so they convey more than the rest of the disk.
Otherwise, the album consists of heavy grooves that lack emotional sustenance. “Discotheque” is a perfect example, since the lyrics fade into babble while the guitar riff lingers endlessly. “Do You Feel Loved” is about as compelling as a conversation with a computer, while “Mofo” is essentially a dense, cluttered, cacophonous ‘wall of mess’. You know that there’s a problem when the whiny “Staring At the Sun” is the most commercially viable song on the album. Then again, if it were by Donna Summer…
Grade: 
 
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