At A Place Called Vertigo

Dizzy happy with the new U2 album. I don't know yet if it's better than All That You Can't Leave Behind, but it does feature some of their strongest material in years. My first impression is that it's a collision of the music they played in Dublin back in '79, some soul, and a louder, more vivid version of their "'80's sound."

I think the best thing about U2 is that the intangible feeling you get, the wordless experience they give you in song after song. I think you saw it in the tears of the cast and audience of SNL the other night, and the crowds they generated going up and down the streets of New York.

The last great rock n' roll band. The last band.

"Your head can't rule your heart."

"I've had enough of romantic love."

"I don't need to hear you say/ if we weren't so alike / you'd like me a whole lot more."

Comments

Lono of Denver said…
I am still digesting the new U2 disc. I have listened to it about 5 times, it is no simple record. There is no question it is good... but what I am trying to figure out is just how good. It will be 2005 before I can securely answer that question.
10:34 PM
Darby said…
After listening to it an embarassing number of times, I think it's probably their best album since Achtung Baby. It's more confident and even more daring than AYCLB. It has a miscue or two (Love and Peace or Else cheif among them) but when you take risks like they do, this is inevitable.
7:09 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles, accumulating tension
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit.  This
Read more

Diamonds In The Rough

Happy to announce that my brother and I won the Main St. Waterloo 10th Anniversary Poster Contest, co-sponsored by the Metro Arts Guild . Our piece, entitled "Metamorphisis", is on display at the gallery -- unless it's somewhere else now. I'll try and get a scan of it to put up on the blog (why didn't you think of that before, Darby?) There's a new literary journal out there called A Public Space that could not have started off better. The contributors and bredth of the material really has me excited not just to pick this up, but submit there as well. The coolest thing is they have a new story by Kelly Link. Check out the excerpt . My own zine, Other Than , continues on pace toward completion. It seems like I may be hosting a joint reading at the gallery to launch it along side Osie's Murmur , which would be very cool and exciting. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made it safely into orbit .
Read more