U2 — All That You Can't Leave Behind cover

U2

Item: All That You Can't Leave Behind
Author: Chris Estey

All That You Can't Leave Behind

(2000)

Reviewed by Chris Estey

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Label Interscope RecordsHM Magazine #87January/February 2001

alternative rock pop rock post-punk rock

This is a band that does everything that it can to avoid baggage. That is their most amazing trait -- their ability to resist the musical labels, the spiritual and moralistic projections, and the historical categories we try to hang on them. It leaves us all disoriented, though, often wondering where the band is coming from, with their music and in their message.

U2 started as a Bible study in a poor rural part of Ireland. Three of them were part of a small scriptural fellowship, and then a fourth member, a non-believer who played bass, brought the necessary streak of doubt any mission for God needs when it has to succeed.

I remember U2 on the Boy tour, for their very first album. A concert where they ran out of material but the crowd loved them so much they played their entire debut album over again, with a b-side for a chorus between sets. There were no gold suits -- it was sweat-encrusted t-shirts and black Levis that looked a little dirty. I remember hearing the crisp licks they stole from other, more icy, English wave bands, the dubby musical phrasings they copped from the post-punk crowd, and wondered where all of the Christian imagery was coming from. It was pretty obvious to those of us in the new music underground, even before they started doing interviews. This cord of awkward hope tense and taut beneath the fence of modern rock ambiguity seemed unsettling and begged for explanation.

The years since then have been a blur for us both, with very little explanations from anyone. I spent a bitterly cold winter in a Spokane basement listening to War almost every day, working for a political group to hold the American government accountable for their actions in Central America. Joshua Tree came out just when I was discovering other Christian music that didn't seem stupid, apolitical, or hopelessly obvious and conformist, and it worked. It started changing my mind about what God could mean.

U2 has passed through their three-album self-mockery period (the 90s), an artful submission to the technocratic future-now pop imperative, and while some claim that was some of their best work, us old-timers were a little wary of the make-up and burbling synth experiments. It's sort of what Joe Carducci talked about in his Henry Rollins-financed book Rock & the Pop Narcotic, and I'll apply his primary assertion to this band: There is a 'pop' aesthetic, which means entering the world and reflecting it, trying to adapt, while mutating reality from within. The pop approach can be subversive. But the rock approach is radical -- it attacks the world from outside, and that was the U2 we had grown up with -- the committed, passionate, Jesus-loving political rockers storming the 'bastilles' in the name of peace and mercy. (Note: the album-title Pop, on their previous record.)

On "All That You Can't Leave Behind" I hear a band moving in an entirely new direction again. This is soul music: On the surface, it's more R&B-based, with more traditional sweeping grand gestures than the band has released since Joshua Tree. ("Walk On" is gorgeous gospel-pop, and will be inspiring lesser lights in the CCM world for many years to come; "In A Little While" is a delightful Al Green grinder with Bono's best vocals ever.) Deeper still, the lyrics show a band more concerned with the things of God than the trappings of this world, which they successfully mocked on the past few releases.

I'm still not sure if this is a 'rock' album; I do know that for the first time since Joshua Tree, I actually don't care. I mean, there are rocking passages -- "Kite," "New York" -- that are beautiful and brutal, always U2's most favored combination. But this is another slick album, at first sounding like it was recorded in heavy gauze, as most digitally recorded albums by wealthy pop stars sound these days. After several listens, though, the message of the lyrics -- live in this moment, but don't evade the eternal; you can't get the sweetness without the suffering and occasional lack of meaning in this world -- came through to me, and the songs on the album unfolded, reaching out like a delicate, but somehow invincible flower, strong in its weaknesses, full of joyful promises for the spring.