Album Review: U2, "No Line on the Horizon"

Bono (on the left), shortly after his demotion to lance corporal.

2009's No Line on the Horizon represents a minor return to form after the relative disappointment of 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, which was a much weaker album than its predecessor, 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind.

In terms of sales, however, the 2009 album was unable to stem the band's declining popularity. In the fairly representative UK market, No Line sold less than a third of what its inferior predecessor did, and only a quarter of what All That You Can't Leave Behind did. It also failed to generate a hit single.

Despite this it was still an improvement on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and showed that the band was not prepared to "go gentle into that good night."

As on the previous album, co-producer Steve Lilywhite added much-needed punch to the shimmering but increasingly self-indulgent gloss of long-time producers Eno and Lanois.

The burbling rhythms of lead single Get On Your Boots were workmanlike rather than inspiring, but tracks like the soulful I’ll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight and the soaring Magnificent, showed Edge’s searing guitar almost back to its best, although Bono's vocal was clearly getting weaker.

Unknown Caller, a song of redemption channeled through the gizmos of our modern edge, and the plaintive White as Snow, written from the perspective of a soldier dying in Afghanistan, showed that the band were still able to dig deep and take chances with imaginative themes.

In the big picture, No Line on the Horizon was another uptick in the generally downward trajectory of U2's musical output since the early 90s. The line of their career has clearly been a lot more erratic than the depressingly flat line featured on the album’s cover.

Grade B

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
28th February, 2015

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!