U2: Days of Ash review – Six new tracks underscore the band as a vital political voice | U2

IIt’s been nearly nine years since U2 released a collection of original material, 2017’s Songs of Experience. They’ve hardly been idle since then: two tours, two films, a 40-day residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, and nearly three hours of re-recording old material on Songs of Surrender, plus Bono’s autobiography, which spawned a solo tour, a Broadway stint and a play. last film. An impressive workload by any standard.

However, you can view the gap between original albums – the longest in U2 history – as evidence of the problem that has bedeviled the band for nearly 20 years: Where do U2 fit into the current music landscape?

The obvious answer is to acquiesce to the ‘heritage rock’ label, rest on the laurels of their back catalogue, and parlay it into touring hits. This clearly doesn’t sit well, as evidenced by Bono and The Edge explaining that a 2017 tour in which The Joshua Tree played 1987 in its entirety wasn’t about nostalgia. So what else? They’ve tried everything, from reasserting their experimental credentials on No Line on the Horizon to trying to play 21st-century pop at its own game — AutoTune on vocals, hitmaker Ryan Tedder in the producer’s chair, a mooted but unrealized collaboration with David Guetta, a doomed attempt to grapple with the era’s new distribution mediums in their disastrous association with Apple — without ever recapturing the success or spirit of the departed. The imperial phase of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Which brings us to Days of Ash, which isn’t a taster of their upcoming album, but, like Bruce Springsteen’s last album Streets of Minnesota, an attempt to revive the quick-response spirit of the protest song of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 Ohio single. It’s an idea you might expect to happen to more people lately. If CSNY can put Ohio on the US chart within weeks of the Kent State shooting it commemorates — back in 1970, when getting a single into the charts required physically pressing records and distributing them to stores and serving radio stations — there seems no reason why artists couldn’t use the faster processes of the streaming era to use it that way: there’s something a little depressing about the fact that it’s currently the province of old-fashioned rednecks like Springsteen and U2. Three of the EP’s five songs—there’s also a short verse interlude as well as a musical interlude—commemorate recent deaths in conflicts and protests: those of peaceful Palestinian activist Awad Hadalain, 16-year-old Iranian protester Sarina Esmailzadeh, and, most recently, the January 7 shooting of Renee Nicole Judd.

The latter informs the EP’s title track, American Obituary, on which U2 sound angrier than they have in years, both in the lyrics, which have a confrontational barricade-man tone rarely heard in U2’s work since the war era – “America will rise up against the lying people… The power of the people is far stronger than the people in power” – and musically: a soup of distorted guitar, rumbling bass and siren-calling electronics.

In later tracks, the music shifts into a less aggressive mode—more acoustic guitars, less The Edge in full flight, and a noticeably hazier atmosphere—and the lyrics take on a more familiar tone of solace and optimism: biblical imagery, Bono-esque aphorisms (“The future, everyone knows, is where we’ll spend the rest of our lives”). But there remains a real pressing need, undoubtedly linked to the relatively rapid transformation of the European Parliament. It stands in stark contrast to the mass of second-guessing, re-recording and abandoned projects that characterized U2’s last two decades; Denying themselves the opportunity to overthink things seems to have turned U2 into overdrive. There’s a fragility to Tears of Things’ attack on fascism and religious fundamentalism that seems noticeably absent from parts of their recent work. “When people talk to God, it always ends in tears,” Bono sings.

Everything doesn’t work. Their collaboration with Ed Sheeran, Yours Eternally, is less controversial than some contemporary stabs at U2’s 21st-century catalog, but the problem is that the sound of Sheeran’s voice and guitar have become instantly recognizable thanks to his ubiquity over the past 15 years, meaning his guest appearances overwhelm the song by default.

You’d also hesitate to herald the EP as evidence of a new approach, not least because Bono has announced that the music on his upcoming album is nothing like this, but rather closer to a “carnival atmosphere”. But what you can safely say is that U2’s aforementioned imperial phase was fueled by an almost religious fervor, a strong sense of purpose and a belief in the power of music to effect change – things that their post-punk contemporaries found ridiculously uncool – and that fervor, purpose and faith have been restored here.