From the start, it was clear that U2 could create impressive music. The jagged guitar riff and thundering drone that launched "I Will Follow" and the rest of their 1981 debut album, Boy, was eloquent and visceral. It was also musically uncomplicated; these four young Dubliners had an instinctive sense for making the most out of simple shifts in dynamics and elementary voicings, and it gave their sound a rough, exhilarating grandiloquence. The only problem was that once U2 caught a listener's attention, they had little to say. Boy waxed poetic on the mysteries of childhood without really illuminating any of them; October, its successor, wrapped itself in romance and religion
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but didn't seem to understand either. Without a viewpoint that could conform to the stirring rhythms and sweeping crescendos of their music, U2 often ended up sounding dangerously glib.
With their third album, War, U2 have found just such a perspective, and with it, have generated their most fulfilling work vet. War makes for impressive listening, but more important, it deals with a difficult subject in a sensible way. That subject is the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, or what the Irish call "the troubles." U2 are not the first group to play soldiers with this topic: Belfast's Stiff Little Fingers have dealt with the problem explicitly, the Clash somewhat more obliquely. But no one has caught the paradox between stance and action so accurately.
"Sunday Bloody Sunday," which opens the album, apparently addresses Bloody Sunday, a 1972 incident in which British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in an illegal civil-rights demonstration in Londonderry. As an acoustic guitar and a sizzling hi-hat build tension, vocalist Bono Vox sings. "I can't believe the news today...." The band slips into some lush, sustained chords as he wonders, "How long? How long must we sing this song?" then jumps back into a militant, jagged dance beat.
It's great drama, and it lends a certain amount of credence to the song's wistful chorus, "Tonight, we can be as one. Tonight!" But Vox tips his hand when he sings the urgent disclaimer. "I won't heed the battle call It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall." What Vox and the band are saying, then, is that it's pointless to take irresponsible risks when confronting irresponsible authority – but one must still take some sort of stance.
Unlike the Clash, who wrestle with imperialist foreign policy, or the Gang of Four, who try to transfer a Marxist dialectic to the dance floor, U2 don't pretend to have the answers to the world's troubles. Instead, they devote their energies to letting us know that they are concerned and to creating an awareness about those problems. And not only is that refreshing, but it makes sense, because U2 understand that it's the gesture, not the message, that counts.
Complementing U2's lyrical growth is a newly developed dark sense of
With this 1983 release -- the last "raw" album U2 would make -- the band created the concept of an alternative arena rock group. The word "anthemic" doesn't even come close to describing the grandiose post-punk that they play here: this is genuinely brilliant, flag-waving rock music. U2 never sounded so totally rocking, so passionate and, honestly, so good.
