BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

A beautiful, mysterious, seductive album that revived rock in the virtual musical wasteland of the 80s.

U2 has been instrumental in keeping rock alive as a creative art form in a period when pop music has become more and more branded and predictable, pablum for the masses.

But then there is U2 raising the flag of justice, love, indignation, longing.

"Joshua Tree" put them on the map. After 20 years, it is as fresh as though it were recorded this morning.

Rock has always been split into two sides: the seductively pounding dance bands and the more soulful poetic/instrumentalists. U2 definitively falls into the latter category, while the Rolling Stones, for example, fall into the former.

(Of course, you can still rock to U2. It's just a matter of emphasis.)

"Joshua Tree," oddly, is relatively more personal and less political than most of their work, but as oversize and compelling as anything they have ever done.

For anyone in search of themselves, there can be no finer anthem than "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

For anyone having experienced the pain of love, "With or Without You" is a piercing reminder.

And they don't forget their politices in a song like "Mothers of the Disappeared."

No band may better know how to introduce a song with lush instrumentalization, and then have Bono's booming voice roll out and grab you by the throat.

"The Joshua Tree" reminds us that rock is alive and well, as long as U2 is around.


From an online reviewer:

"There is within music an ability to tap into the raw, revelatory power of beauty; music can give itself to the unknown whisper of the eternal in ways that other forms of art only hint at. The collage of sounds communicates something deep to the heart and, when combined with the presence of the voice, can be downright liberating. Few individuals, let alone bands, ever really reach a point where they are that open to the Unknown that it can give itself so freely through their music. U2 has done so time and again, but never with the level of directness and sincerity as they accomplished on the Joshua Tree.

A joshua tree is a real tree that thrives despite the dry environment it lives in. The image - the icon - of life amidst its seeming absence, embodied in the joshua tree, is one that is fully appropriate to U2 - particularly at the end of their first decade. U2, like the joshua tree, stood in stark contrast to its environment: ascetic, prophetic and disarmingly (some would say "naively", but let the tension stand) sincere. (Their foray into the realm of post-modern sampling, irony and sarcasm was an identity crisis fully in line with where they stood in the 80s: cynicism is frustrated optimism.)

"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", the second song, really expresses the kernel of The Joshua Tree; every other song fleshes it out in some way or another. The album is, in the end, about distance: "I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls only to be with you: But I still haven't found what I'm looking for." While one may take this to be an admission of defeat - and distance whispers of despair as much as consummation - doing so is incorrect: "I'm still running," Bono sings. The song is an expression of hope more than anything.

Faith is a raw and disarmingly rough beauty; it looks within and it looks without. "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Mothers of the Disappeared" give full expression to U2's long-time political engagement, while "With or Without You" gives a glimpse into U2's more tender side. "With or Without You" may very well be the best love song of the 80s. "One Tree Hill", a deeply personal song about the death of a friend, moves with passion and rugged grace - and, again, with hope: "I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky and the moon has turned red over one tree hill."

I look forward to the day when my children ask me, "Dad, did you ever listen to U2?" Not only will I have stories to tell about live concerts, but I will be able to relive with them the goosebumps that certain songs will inevitably bring. If rock is dead, U2 was its apex. And U2 has yet to be eclipsed."





BUZZFLASH REVIEWS