Stephen Thomas Erlewine (All Music Guide)

Nearly ten years after beginning U2 Mach II with their brilliant seventh album Achtung Baby, U2 eases into their third phase with 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind. The title signifies more than it seems, since the group sifts through their past, working with Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, all in an effort to construct a classicist U2 album. Thankfully, it's a rock record from a band that absorbed all the elastic experimentation, studio trickery, dance flirtations, and genre bending of Achtung, Zooropa, and Pop — all they've shed is the irony. U2 chooses not to delve as darkly personal as they did on Achtung or Zooropa, yet they also avoid the alienating archness of Pop, returning to the generous spirit that flowed through their best '80s records. On that level, All may be reminiscent of The Joshua Tree, but this is a clever and craftsmanlike record, filled with nifty twists in the arrangements, small sonic details and colors. U2 take subtle risks, such as their best pure pop song ever with "Wild Honey"; they're so self-confident, they effortlessly write their best anthem in years with "Beautiful Day"; they offer the gospel-influenced "Stuck in a Moment," never once lowering it to the schtick it would have been on Rattle & Hum. Like any work from craftsmen, All That You Can't Leave Behind winds up being a work of modest pleasures, where the way the verse eases into the chorus means more than the overall message, and this is truly the first U2 album where that sentiment applies - but there is genuine pleasure in their craft, for the band and listener alike.

Steven Stolder (Amazon.com)

The foursome come roaring out of the blocks with their latest collection. The album's first single, "Beautiful Day," raced to the No. 1 slot on the U.K. singles charts and received a similar rapturous reception stateside. From its shimmering preamble to its sweeping, infectious chorus, it perfectly stakes out the middle ground between the anthemic U2 of the '80s and the more grounded group of the '90s. With Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno sharing production chores again after having taken a break with Pop, the U2 team enters the new millennium with their lineup--and mission--intact.

Andrew Mueller (Amazon.co.uk)

If U2 hadn't used the title already, "A Sort Of Homecoming" might have suited this, their 10th studio album. All That You Can't Leave Behind sounds, at various points, like any or all of U2's previous albums, as if the band are sending postcards back from a protracted ramble through previously conquered territories. The euphoric first single, and opening track, "Beautiful Day", reintroduced Edge's signature delay-laden guitar solos, pretty much absent since The Unforgettable Fire. Elsewhere, the gospel stylings of Rattle & Hum resurface on "Stuck In A Moment", and the deranged, Prodigy-influenced dance textures that characterised their previous album, Pop, crop up on "Elevation". None of this should be taken as suggestion that this always commendably restless group are running out of ideas. Having spent the 1990s making three of the most bizarre and adventurous albums ever delivered by a stadium rock band (the consecutive masterpieces Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop), it's as if they are now trying to figure out if there was one particular thing they always did best. On the evidence presented here, it's that combination of U2's facility for the epic playing alongside Bono's increasing lyrical interest in intimacy: "Walk On" and "Peace On Earth" are two of the best things he has ever written or sung. All That You Can't Leave Behind confirms that U2's laurels are continuing to make them itch.

David Sprague (Barnes & Noble)

For most of their two decades together, U2 have ranked among the most forward-looking of rock's mega-bands, which makes their decision to "get back to their roots" on this remarkably evocative album a curious -- but thoroughly positive -- one. The electronics, irony, and distance of recent years have largely been stripped away, all the better to concentrate on the Edge's still visceral guitar playing and Bono's eternally questing presence. The singer proves he can still send shivers down the spine by soaring through songs such as the yearning "Peace on Earth," but he's just as capable of capturing attention with subtlety and a downbeat delivery, as he does on the pensive "New York." A good bit of All That You Can't Leave Behind comes couched in dark hues, thanks to Bono's heart-on-his-sleeve musings and the seductive production of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno. But there are moments of outright abandon giddy enough to pack a dance floor with folks doing the old bump 'n' grind, including the lusty "Wild Honey" and the soulful spirit-lifter "Stuck in a Moment." U2's rhythm section, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton, who sounded somewhat tentative on experimental discs such as Pop and Zooropa, positively leap into the hard-charging grooves of songs such as "Elevation" and the corny but infectious "Walk On," a pair of songs that bring to mind the vibrant Rattle and Hum-era incarnation of the band. This appropriately titled disc is, in many ways, a reclamation of styles and notions U2 once discarded as outmoded, only to find that they fit mighty well after all.

(CD Universe)

U2: Bono (vocals, guitar, synthesizer); The Edge (guitar, piano, synthesizer, background vocals); Adam Clayton (bass); Larry Mullen (drums, percussion).
Additional personnel: Daniel Lanois (guitar, background vocals); Paul Barrett (brass); Brian Eno (synthesizer, programming, background vocals).
Recorded in Dublin, Ireland and France.
"Beautiful Day" won the 2001 Grammy Awards for Record Of The Year, for Song Of The Year and for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.

ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Rock Album. "Walk On" won the 2002 Grammy Award for Record Of The Year. "Elevation" won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal. "Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of" won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal.
Seldom has an album title been as appropriate as ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND. Here, U2 returns to its pre-irony '80s glory days with a straightforward rock approach, leaving behind the electronics and intentional mock-decadence of POP and ZOOROPA. It quickly becomes clear however, that the band had to make those albums in order to get to the ego-free state from which this one emerges. While Larry Mullen's driving beat, Adam Clayton's insistently throbbing bass, the Edge's chiming guitar, and Bono's soulful vocals mesh as in the days of yore, there's a less messianic feel to the proceedings that must have resulted from the group's ego-deflating '90s endeavors.
While POP and ZOOROPA were the sound of four guys having fun, on this album U2 manages to combine unpretentious joy with the open-hearted rock power of its early recordings. From the spiritual warmth of "Grace" to the soul leanings of "In a Little While," the band regains the organic quality that had been missing from its music of the previous decade. What sounds like an unusually hands-off approach on the part of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois can only mean that they were smart enough not to fix what was clearly not broken.

Peter Orlov (CMJ New Music Report, issue 689, October 30, 2000)

The unadulterated explosion of positive sentiment and classic Edge guitar that ushers in the chorus of "Beautiful Day," the opening track of the highly anticipated All That You Can't Leave Behind, lays out the album's territory rather clearly. Forget Zooropa and the discotheque -- you are now entering an irony-free zone, where you, too, can get back in touch with the "real" U2. After spending the '90s in the throes of reinvention, the Irish quartet returns to the task of spiritually uplifting the masses with "three chords and the truth," and ends up making a soulful rock record that could easily be mistaken for a 21st-century Joshua Tree follow-up. Moving between aggrandizing power-chords (the majestic come-on, "Elevation") and the slide-guitar-generated Euro-blues wistfulness he's perfected (best served on the searching "Kite"), the Edge drifts back to the other side of the Eno-and-Lanois mixing board to reassert himself as one of the most influential rock figures of the past 20 years. And having shed the veils that shadowed his Achtung/Pop message, Bono clears his throat and abandons the bully pulpit, with only a single examination of confusion (the deadening, near-brilliant "New York") muddying his invocation to try a little tenderness.

Ben Gilbert (DOT Music)

Everything you know is wrong. Or so U2 claimed on the multi-media overload intro sequence of the Zoo TV tour back in 1992.
To put it more accurately and adapt that post-modern adage for U2's ninth album, everything you've read is wrong. Because, despite the almost universal hyperbole that has greeted 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', this is no masterpiece. Certainly not by U2's stratospheric standards.
Over three years since the erratically brilliant 'Pop' and with the 'dark' neo-industrial resurrection of 'Achtung Baby' - the band's peak - almost a decade old, it would appear U2 have shot straight through Heaven and missed God's parking space, such is the lightweight understatement of this record. Rightly, Bono and the boys have been elevated to a magnificently grandiose position, but too much of 'All That You...' rolls past like a spanking red carpet, limped on by leaden-footed royalty.
The album does have its share of inspirational moments. Bombastic single 'Beautiful Day', kicks things off, an unashamedly soaring chorus making up for the suspicion of not much else going on. The marvellously plaintive 'Peace On Earth' somehow sidesteps sycophantic, bilious schmaltz, as Bono chokes on lines such as "Jesus can you take the time, to throw a drowning man a line", while the howling, guitar chainsaw 'Elevation' is expertly adrenalised U2. As affecting is the arch chest-beating and chiming axe envelopes of 'Walk On', a transcendent return to U2's glorious, already legendary past.
And herein lies the crux in many of the thoughts recently committed to print: that U2 have ditched the experimentation and clawing grasps at the zeitgeist, to return to their more straightforward roots. However, the flat landscape of 'All That You...' is not one that this writer recognises. There is little of the widescreen drama of old, a sense of danger, unpredictability, burning devotion, whatever. Call it U2's ability to take the listener by the throat and drag them to the water's edge. Too often, guitars are clean and precise, rhythms safe and rudimentary, the atmospherics staid and the production vacuously pretty.
The worst culprits are the mildly engaging meanderings of 'In A little While', an overblown but underfed 'Kite' and the loose country plod of 'Wild Honey', none of which would dare to feed from the rich man's table of so much of U2's death-defying career. Even the gleaming ambience of much of 'New York' becomes clumsily frenetic and messy, a poor relative of 'Pop's 'Miami'.
Lyrically, Bono, as always, has his moments, but more for foolish aberrations than wild poetic perception. This reaches an absolute nadir - of Gallagherian proportions - on the otherwise fizzing frenzy of 'Elevation', when the "sky...fly...high" treadmill is wheeled-out like a corpse. And that's saying nothing of a mole couplet that no amount of drugs/Third World debt/meetings with The Pope can excuse. He is, though, forgiven, simply for a disarming line in 'Peace On Earth' - "where I grew up, there weren't many trees. Where there was, we'd tear them down. And use them on our enemies".
But such inspiration is, sadly, diluted and as for the decision to include 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' - originally featured on 'The Million Dollar Hotel' soundtrack - as a bonus track, to, like, sell more records? The word insult springs to mind.
I guess we'll just have to look forward to the stage pyrotechnics of the gargantuan live shows to cover-up the cracks. Have U2 used a lemon yet? Because they've just released one.

John Sakamoto (JAM! Music, October 28, 2000)

More than any other rock band to emerge in the post-punk era, U2 has both cultivated the notion of subtext and had it enthusiastically foisted upon them.
A disproportionate amount of the group's identity is tied to the ever shifting perception of its larger intent -- "The Joshua Tree" as grand, mainstream move, "Pop" as attempted accommodation with "dance" music, and so forth -- usually with various members' eager complicity.
It is, ultimately, what sets U2 apart from every other stadium act of the past 20 years.
The subtext of "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (in stores Tuesday) is a familiar one: the abandonment of the big, ambitious concept in favour of the simple pleasures of The Song.
It is a message U2 has been delivering so efficiently in interviews, it occasionally sounds more like a marketing plan than a philosophy.
It also reminds us that this is a band whose work benefits significantly from the presence of what Bono refers to a couple of times on the new album as "the big i-DEE-ah".
If you haven't listened to it lately, dust off your copy of "Pop" and play "Please", "Last Night On Earth", "If You Wear That Velvet Dress", or "If God Will Send His Angels".
On their own, they don't sound fundamentally different from the majority of songs on half a dozen other U2 albums. But place them next to the handful of tracks that actually express "Pop"'s "electronic" aesthetic -- "Discotheque", "Mofo", "Do You Feel Loved" -- and they take on a dimension that transforms them into something more than they would otherwise be.
In the absence of that type of conceptual framework, the 11 songs on "All That You Can't Leave Behind" are forced to stand or fall on their own individual merits.
In this age of the context-killing Napster, the good-to-bad-to-indifferent ratio is pretty much what we've come to expect: "When I Look At The World", "Kite" and, especially, "Walk On" can stand alongside all but a handful of U2's best material.
"New York", "In A Little While", "Beautiful Day" and "Elevation" will all pack infinitely more power in concert than they do here.
And the rest varies from pleasant ("Stuck In A Moment", "Wild Honey") to mildly annoying ("Grace", "Peace On Earth").
That last song is perhaps the album's most problematic. An achingly heartfelt plea for peace, its lyrics are among the most nakedly personal Bono has ever written. But unlike, say, "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" or "Sunday Bloody Sunday", this is an anthem that suffers from both the lack of an obvious target to rail against and an utter absence of musical intensity, as encapsulated by an unspeakably cornball drum part.
For those of us who stubbornly continue to greet each new U2 album with an unreasonably heightened sense of anticipation, that just doesn't seem like enough; not in a year in which other bands (Radiohead being the most obvious example) are gleefully releasing music whose ambition clearly exceeds their ability -- not the other way around.
Perhaps more than anything else, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" leaves behind an impression that even the group's staunchest critics would not apply to any other U2 album: That this is the sound of a band that has lost its nerve.

(NewMusicalExpress)

Where do you go once you've gone over the top? After you've shared enormodome stages with gigantic fruit, written operatic quasi-techno tunes about consumerism eclipsing spirituality, given your sunglasses to the Pope? After you've tried to be about Art and Politics? There's only one place to go. Back to the drawing board, and try to be about Music.
U2 are both the world's biggest rock band and its most ridiculous. Their flag-waving epic affectations (and their mullets) defined the '80s, but their grip on the zeitgeist slipped and they spent the majority of the '90s trying to regain it. This meant prancing around in wraparound shades and leather trousers, making ill-advised 'dance' records and trying to save the world. For the most part, they got away with it. But even they realised, sometime during the ludicrous hullabaloo of 1997's PopMart stadium romp, how far they had travelled from Planet Reality.
The making of 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', U2 album number nine, was reportedly fraught with indecision. It took much longer than anticipated to complete, but they have emerged with possibly their most straightforward, honest record. Gone are the experimental ambitions and Big Ideas, back are the chiming guitars, the stratospheric synth and - best of all - the tunes. '...Leave Behind' is modern enough to sound new, but sufficiently evocative of their prime '...Joshua Tree' days to make it seem as though they have come full circle.
There is no fat on this record, the lines are clean. Its beauty is in subtlety rather than extravagance - a feat for a band responsible for some of the most hyperbolic moments in the history of sound. Easing with the heat-hazy optimism of 'Beautiful Day', each song is as much a showcase for Bono's freshly fine-tuned vocals as it is an extension of the album's very apt central theme - the clarity to be found once obstacles are overcome. In addition to the well-exercised U2 template (The Edge's hallmark fretwork) on 'Walk On' and 'Elevation', there are also some interesting surprises. 'Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of' conjures up the soul-pop of Dusty Springfield, 'In A Little While' evokes the funky blues rock of prime era Stones, and 'Wild Honey' has an alt-country backbone. Although this is clearly a record made by men coming to terms with middle age, it refuses to feel tired.
This being U2, there are naff moments, notably 'Peace On Earth', where Bono's idealism veers into sentimentality. And, like all comfortable, streamlined things, '...Leave Behind' is also a teensy bit dull. It is, nevertheless, a laudable achievement.
Where do you go once you've gone over the top? If you're U2, you simply move on - sunglasses firmly in place - into the blue horizon.

Brent DiCrescenzo (Pitchfork Media, November 2000)

The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind" implies facing up to their platinum salad days of the Edge's trademark echo shimmers and Paul "Bono Vox" Hewson's Lexus-honk vocals. For the general public, the title reifies our struggle to leave behind the image of Bono hatching from a disco lemon, dressed in that rayon six-pack t-shirt. For a band settled into four-letter pseudonyms from their 1980 debut, breaking up never seemed like an option. From day one, U2 was a rock constellation-- a warplane-- and we expected epics. It's an early affair, a hazy infatuation, that has since bloated into comfortable taking-for-granted. As with all ubiquitous products, the familiarity of logos, slogans, and icons eventually supplants whatever original feelings we may have had.
U2 are, indeed, a universal product, much like the Catholic Church Bono humbly admires. The swoosh on The Edge's skully cap, and the golden arches of Bono's glasses spring to mind. Song titles and lyrics on All That boldly declare familiar, safe dogma and generic commandments, such as "Grace", "Peace on Earth", "I believe in you," "Won't you take me, take me please," "I know it aches, and your heart breaks," etc. This new batch of songs heralds a conscious and welcome revocation of dance-inflected bubbleglam, but scales back too far. In searching so hard for their souls, U2 have hacked away their flesh and skull, leaving a lobotomized approximation of glory.
"Beautiful Day" opens with bombast after a cheeky keyboard tease, and peaks with Bono's cracking voice in the shouted coda: "What you don't have/ You don't need it now!" And so the album climaxes at 3½ minutes. The gospel ballad, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", maintains the buzz admirably, again peaking in the coda with Brian Eno's faux-brass keyboard belts. Elsewhere, Eno's fingerprints remain undusted. The album could have benefited from more of him; apparently, it takes Brian Eno + Berlin to = renaissance.
"Elevation" slaughters hope with reckless chops of the hackneyed sword, as Bono commits songwriting faux pas #1: rhyming "sky" with "fly" and "high." The details will be spared, but you can work it out. Damn you, God and aerodynamics, for making altitude a necessity for flight, in the sky, which happens to be above us. As the album's sticker proclaims, "Walk On" is locked and loaded as the second single. Epic midtempo should always follow punchy power-rock, you see. Nice, but unexciting. Here, Bono seems dead set on ruining U2's return with clichés. Minutes after the aforementioned poetic gaffe, he returns with, "A singing bird in a cage/ Who will only fly/ Fly for freedom." That little bird is you, guys! Free yourself from your cage! For freedom!
The record stomps around in this valley before mounting another two-song peak with "In a Little While" and "Wild Honey". On the former, the vulnerability of Bono's "vox" makes a welcome return from minute 3:30 to inject some heartfelt emotion into the tingling doo-wop. "That girl!/ That girl!/ She's mine," Bono bellows with larynx scratches, evoking the dead spirit of Van Morrison. "Wild Honey" similarly ob-la-dis like a giddy Van, and somehow escapes the shame of Bono declaring, "I was a monkey." Testament to the band there.
But it's back into the dark nadir until the album's closer. Bono joins hands with Sinéad O'Connor in healing the world on the tepid carol, "Peace on Earth". "Jesus, can you take the time/ To throw a drowning man a line," Bono asks. Hey, if the world is so dark, take off your sunglasses. Bono's Healing Heart takes a "look at the world" on the next track, and discovers that people "feel all kinds of things." Indeed.
But not even Tom Waits' grizzled pipes could salvage the atrocity of "New York". Over one of the best musical beds he's ever been offered, Bono weaves a Hallmark lover's tale, in the city where "Irish, Italians/ Jews, and Hispanics/ Religious nuts [and] political fanatics/ [Stir] in the stew/ Happily/ Not like me and you." Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album-- one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics. Beautiful day, certainly, but the rest of the week was all jetlag and rain. Can't The Edge sing, too?

Mark Blake (Q Magazine)

Edge squints into a compact mirror, checking the detail on that moustache. Bono ponders Third World debt and a future missive to Kofi Annan. Adam Clayton leafs through the latest Italian Vogue ? wow, a Versace pollution mask ? Larry Mullen Jr thinks about Passengers Original Soundtracks 1 and scowls. Possibly?Only U2 themselves know what went on inside the lemon. The rest of us can just speculate. Every evening on their 1997-'98's PopMart tour they clambered into the windowless pod. Accompanied by the din of unseen stadium crowds, it would hover across the stage before splitting open to reveal the band. Locked in there night after night, what did U2 talk about? That next time they should make an old-fashioned rock'n'roll record and leave the big yellow thing at home? Possibly.
U2's last album, Pop, was a bumpy ride, inspired, but overreaching and messy. Discothèque deserves a place in the Top 20 Greatest U2 Songs Of All Time, but it's a brave soul who returns to Please or Wake Up Dead Man by their own volition. Worryingly the latter trailed off with a dour Bono intoning, "Jesus, Jesus help me I'm alone in this world and a fucked-up world it is too". Just how bad is it to be the singer in U2? Never mind, the group had been felled by pre-millennium tension three years early. Poor lambs.
Thank God then that they've perked up. All That You Can't Leave Behind's first shot across the bows is the single Beautiful Day. Its bobbing, spacey intro cues up a toppling, familiar guitar pattern. Bursting with optimism, the lasting impression is of the singer gambolling Julie Andrews-style across rolling hills, arms outstretched, glad to be alive. But all the while singing in a grown-up voice and reminding us that this is the work of 40-year-olds with the life experiences to match. The choral interlude two minutes and 44 seconds in is a flash of pure genius, and Beautiful Day makes for what Neil Tennant once called a great "ice rink record" ? in that it probably sounds wonderful when pumped out of distorted speakers at a provincial skating rink. Only an utter bastard then would mention the ghost of A-ha's The Sun Always Shines On TV passing through the room when Bono roars "Touch me, take me to that other place." Sorry.
U2's new-found zest for life is still undiminished on Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of. 1998's Number 3 hit Sweetest Thing was a charming pop song and there are echoes of it here. Over a lilting, soulful piano figure Bono quips, "I'm just trying to find a decent melody", despite having already found one that's more than adequate.
Elevation is a reminder then that U2's brave new world isn't exclusively hearts and flowers. The chainsaw guitars are left over from Achtung Baby and it has the unusual distinction of being the first rock song since Mercury Rev's Holes to mention moles. In this case the little nocturnal blighters are "digging in a hole, digging up my soul". Edge slips his leash halfway through, suggesting it will sound monumental live.
Throughout the album, the lyrics return to themes of redemption, of rebirth. "I'm not afraid of anything in this world, there's nothing you can throw at me that I haven't already heard," Bono insists during Stuck In A Moment? Perhaps the ain't-life-grand theme is a by-product of U2's rediscovered confidence in what they do; maybe the singer has negotiated some personal crisis and emerged on top. Either way it invests much of All That You Can't Leave Behind with an upbeat quality that partners the music perfectly.
Then they come within a hair's breadth of screwing it up. Walk On might have been left off '84's The Unforgettable Fire. Jangly Edge guitar fill here; single-note piano motif there; big Bono bellow everywhere. The webcam in the studio would surely have captured the band laughing guiltily at the unbridled U2-ness of it all. It's heartfelt certainly but just a tad too obvious. Fifteen years ago, Jim Kerr would have gone down to the crossroads ? in his ladies' leggings and everything ? to sell his soul for this one.
Kite's snoozy melody offers a change of tack and Bono's strongest vocal so far. Chockful of stormy emotion and middle-aged angst ("I'm a ma-a-a-n not a child"), Bono sees it out tackling 21st Century issues and gamely trying to rhyme "new media" with "big idea". The wag. Five songs in and All That You Can't Leave Behind's general tenor is already clear. Pop's clashing soundscapes have been put aside, technology reigned in, and nobody is striving to re-make The Beatles' "White Album". U2 have turned the clock back to doing what U2 used to do. That it's so uncomplicated almost takes time to get used to.
The album's two biggest curveballs are pitched side by side. Spice Girls collaborator Richard Stannard has a hand in the low-key, Motown-ish In A Little While. Edge does a clipped, Ernie Isley thing and Bono gives it his best Smokey Robinson. It could have been horrible but isn't, whizzing by in a charming three-and-a-half minutes and making way for Wild Honey: romantic country-rock, which unlike all other non-Americans playing romantic country-rock isn't trying to be Gram Parsons.
God and his offspring drop by for Peace On Earth, another dogged bid for a Christmas Number 1 (see Pop's If God Will Send His Angels) and another potential stumbling block negotiated. Bono takes Him Upstairs to task and, while there's a sense of revisiting old ground, Peace On Earth wears its sentiments so unselfconsciously that the listener is immediately disarmed. Slipping in on its coat-tails, the squally guitars and widescreen lyrics on When I Look At The World are cast from familiar U2 moulds. But while it taxis along inoffensively enough it never quite manages to get airborne.
New York delivers a truly intimate peek into Bonoworld. The singer recently forked out for an apartment in Manhattan and, like Miami on Pop, it's another song exploring U2's "unquenchable thirst" for America. A needling guitar and Larry Mullen's pattering drums soundtrack the travelogue and Bono's intriguing lyric: "In New York I lost it all to you and your vices/Still, I'm staying on to figure out my midlife crisis/Hit an iceberg in my life/But here I am still afloat." Conclusion: Big Apple consumes Big Man. In contrast, Grace has Bono mopping his brow after all that inner-city/emotional turmoil. Brian Eno seems to have roused himself for this one, pressing various Eno buttons while the others turn in the dictionary definition of understated.
Grace would have been a perfect ending, but the arrival of the non-listed The Ground Beneath Her Feet notches up another little victory. First featured on last year's Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack, the whinnying keyboard figure ? imagine ambient Spaghetti Western music ? and Bono's impassioned "Go lightly down your darkened way" make it one of this album's key moments and a smart, dramatic closer.
Bono's recent dismissal of "the progressive rock lurgy" currently infecting much rock music gave a revealing insight into U2's current mindset. Stepping outside of their natural environment ensured their longevity in the '90s, stepping back in seems to have given them a fresh boost. For all Zooropa and Pop's pushing of the envelope, limiting themselves to rock's core ingredients has given the band a new challenge. Certainly, not since The Joshua Tree have U2 sounded so like U2 but, with songs of this startling calibre, right now being U2 is no bad thing.

James Hunter (RollingStone, issue 853)

U2's tenth studio album and third masterpiece, All That You Can't Leave Behind, is all about the simple melding of craft and song. Their first masterpiece, 1987's The Joshua Tree, imagined cathedrals of ecstasy; their second, 1991's Achtung Baby, banged around fleabag hotels of agony. But on All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 distill two decades of music-making into the illusion of effortlessness usually only possible from veterans. The album represents the most uninterrupted collection of strong melodies U2 have ever mounted, a record where tunefulness plays as central a role as on any Backstreet Boys hit. "I'm just trying to find a decent melody," Bono sings with soulful patience in "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "a song that I can sing in my own company."
Since they shot out of Ireland in 1980, U2 have believed that pop could sing like angels and move like the devil. They have always known devoutly that studio style facilitates meaning. It's why they have always seemed so modern -- this conviction that their sonic play of shades, textures, levels and dissolves amounts to more than an end in itself. This belief has always loomed enormously for U2, from the beat-oriented hummable songs of their first albums, which warmed up New Wave's chilly airs, to the largesse of their War-period arena performances, to their engagement with the geniuses of U.S. roots music, through to their itchy recastings, on Achtung Baby, of transcontinental love and panic. This restlessness reached a high point in 1997, when U2 released Pop, an album dipped in club music and dead set on ironic kicks.
Now, after spending twenty years pushing different styles through the roof, on All That You Can't Leave Behind they table everything except that which now seems most crucial: the songs themselves. All That You Can't Leave Behind flexes with an interior fire. Every track -- whether reflective but swinging, like "Wild Honey," or poised, then pouncing, like "Beautiful Day" -- honors a tune so refined that each seems like some durable old number. Because this is U2, there's a quick impact to these melodies, yet each song has a resonance that doesn't fade with repeated listening.
The melodies mirror the album's production, which is carried off with seeming invisibility by seasoned U2 hands Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, with Steve Lillywhite showing up for a few mixes. Everything coheres in a kind of classically U2 sonic clench: "Walk On" addresses perseverance and reward in its lyrics, but the song is really about its minor-key dance of guitars and rhythms, vocal yearning and hope. "Kite" is about the plight of a fraying couple; when Bono glimpses "the shadow behind your eyes," his lyric evokes the music's slanted conversations of melody and rhythm and guitar figures. Bono's singing has lost some of the extra flamboyance it's had in the past, but it's as passionate as ever -- by reining himself in, he has invested his voice with a new urgency.
All That You Can't Leave Behind gets serious about simplicity. The songs aren't obscured by excessive production, but the band doesn't commit the common sin of boring people silly in the name of scaling back. The Edge's guitars are even more self-effacing than usual, showing up only as conveyors of accent and texture. On "In a Little While," Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen sink deeply into an Al Green whisper-groove, a feat of complex plainness. On the very London pop tune "When I Look at the World," Christmassy synths and choruses achieve an earthy focus, as Bono taps the silver at the top end of his voice.
U2 are no longer idealistic kids. In "New York," the album's penultimate moment, Bono sings as a man in "midlife crisis," desperately drawn to that city's unique brew of noise and reason, chaos and sensation. Scattered through the songs are references to having seen and felt and lived a lot. The band is still looking for what's essential, but on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the drama of that search exists right in the music itself, in the tension between rage and gentleness. On "Grace," Bono highlights a girl who "makes beauty out of ugly things." All That You Can't Leave Behind asks the same question again and again: What else in this damaged world would you spend time looking for?

© Frank Steven Groen