'90s U2

I love both the 80's and 90's of U2. They are SO different it's incredible.
I have grown to hate everything that came after the millennium though.

You may like or dislike the end result, but no one can say they were not trying or evolving.

I loved Achtung Baby, but they lost me with Zooropa and Pop. I admire the desire to go in new directions, they were just directions I didn't want to follow.

Then again, my favorite era of U2 is pre-Unforgettable Fire, so what do I know?

Achtung is their last undebatably great album, but Pop is their nadir, as far as I'm concerned. Zooropa plays like a b-sides compilation - some of it's good, much of it's awful.

I'm not too fond of their last one, but All That You Can't Leave Behind is easily the best thing they put out post-Achtung. There are some misses on there, but it works wonderfully as a pop album, especially if you consider it independent from the rest of their catalog.

I own all of their albums and Zooropa and Pop are the least played. 80's U2 = greatness. Achtung might actually be my favorite album, partly because the 80s albums are so overplayed. It was also the first tape that I actually waited in line at at midnight to get one of the first copies. I had All That You Can't Leave Behind in heavy rotation for awhile. Great album all the way through. How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is hit or miss. But "City of Blinding Lights" is a standout.

When Achtung Baby was released (or more specifically the first single The Fly) I was appalled at what a departure it was. But then it grew on me (and the rest of the world). I loved Zooropa. The title track appealed to my prog rock sensibilities.
I bailed with Pop, however. I guess i had my fill. Haven't really cared for them since.

I know it came out a few (3?) years later but this and REM's "Monster" were the two albums that really got me excited about their respective bands after years of "yeah, U2/REM are cool" ambivalence.

Both albums ended up as last of the good-to-great, but I still spin Achtung regularly whereas Monster, not so much.

I don't want to admit that I love Zooropa, but I love Zooropa. "Lemon" is such a weird, stupid, and awesome song that it always gets stuck in my head.

But yeah, Achtung Baby was definitely my favorite, even over their older stuff, b/c of the production and Edge's guitar work. That was when I was still learning how to play guitar, and when I heard that shit and learned what Edge was doing, my mind exploded.

All of it colliding on that awesome VHS ZOO TV: Live in Sydney Concert, which I watched so much when I was younger.

Actung is the only album I like.

That and "Numb" are the only two songs I really dig on that album.

I'm going to take shit for this but my all-time favorite U2 song is Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me which most fans supposedly loathe.

Pop is underrated and the last really good U2 album.

Most fans of music, at any rate.

I kid, I kid.

I don't know if I was appalled exactly, but, at the time, I was kind of a purist when it came to rock bands augmenting their sound with electronics. I really disliked all of the drum loops and effects. Of course, this ignored the gobs of production on Joshua Tree and Unforgettable Fire, but I didn't really know what I was talking about.

I came around on it, eventually, except for a couple of songs ("Even Better Than the Real Thing" still doesn't do it for me). It's certainly among their best, and some of the best songs are gloriously untouched by radio ("Acrobat," "Love is Blindness," "Ultraviolet").

I penalize you 5 Hipster points for not liking the Johnny Cash song!

I like "Numb" and "Stay (Faraway, So Close)". But even those are kind of minor-league in terms of great U2 songs.

There's a Johnny Cash song?

Agreed. Still they are bright spots on an otherwise forgettable album.

"I went out walking with a bible and a gun..."
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=tOd4CDaUmLc

Stay is nowhere near "minor league" status. I really love that song. Specially sung live.
Which record has Who's gonna ride your wild horses? I also love that one.

"Stay"'s the closest that album has to a classic, but I don't think it's in their top 10 or anything. "Wild Horses" is on Achtung.

I'd recommend instead checking out some early 80s bands that helped "inspire" U2 like Comsat Angels 1st album, Ecco and the Bunnymen, Chameleons (UK), and others that I can't remember.

But, being the huge band that U2 is, their very uninteresting mediocre material tends to be overdiscussed, and accidentally purchased by fans of the band.

I'm completely burnt out on it, but Achtung Baby is still a very good pile of bullshit. It takes a bunch of homages to other bands (Stones, Bowie, etc.), throws them in a blender with fluffy pop rock and towering pompousness, and good production from the Flood/Eno team to provide a modern sheen.

Depeche Mode took a similar approach, and the same producer (Flood) and came up with a much better album in 1993 with Songs Of Faith and Devotion.

Anyways, theres that other U2 stuff. Zooropa and Pop each have a few decent songs, and a bunch of boring crap. That about sums it up. They had a few good singles here and there on soundtracks, so I'd say post-AB 90s U2 is best summed up on a single mixtape.

Exactly.

"Stay" is one of their most beautiful songs.

I prefer their 90's records,"Achtung Baby"(i've been listening to "ultra violet" a lot recently) being my favourite.
The material they've released this decade has been boring run-of-the-mill pop music,i just can't get excited about a new U2 track anymore,which is sad.

Kudos Ratty for mentioning "Hold me,Thrill me,Kiss me,Kill me".

I think I'm the only person on the planet that really loves Zooropa, but that's OK. It's a messy b-sides compilation that feels like an album all the same. It's also fairly straightforward despite being labeled as "adventurous." Really, Numb and Lemon are the most "adventurous" forays into industrial and disco (respectively) with Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car being a little weird...but not enough to label it experimental.

But the straightforward songs like "Stay," "Dirty Day" and "The Wanderer" are, in my opinion, actually quite beautiful.

Pop, on the other hand, doesn't do it for me. It just feels overly manufactured, as does everything they've done since.

I remember it now. Thanks for the link.

I LOVE that fucking song, and I'm a massive U2 fan.

LOVE Achtung Baby - their best album, undoubtedly

Like both Zooropa and Pop, but prefer Zooropa. Pop definitely sounds undercooked, but I'll never understand why it's widely regarded as not just a bad U2 album, but a disaster of epic proportions. There's some good shit on there. And I mean that in the best possible way.

The Johnny Cash tune ('The Wanderer') is probably in my top 10 U2 songs.

Also LOVE, LOVE, LOVE 'Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me'.

Wow Bob - are you me?

Loved U2 through much of the late 80's, early 90's culminating in seeing them live for their Zooropa Zoomerang Tour.

The honestly, Pop came out and they lost me.

But I really quite adore not just Achtung, but Zooropa as well.

As a huge U2 fan, it's interesting to see casual listeners rate the boys' output.

POP is an odd story; it really wasn't finished at the time of release and the album and tour suffered for it. All the same, they kept tinkering with it and the singles released are quite different from their album counterparts. And a helluva lot better. On the whole, I stand by POP, even if it was a bit of a misfire. The single Please is one of their best songs.

A lot of small releases post-Pop are fantastic. Songs like Electrical Storm and The Ground Beneath Her Feet rank right up there.

It's a bummer that so many don't seem to appreciate their latest albums. They're really solid stuff.

Nope! I love it.
I suffered through U2's initial popularity in the 80's. I hated them with a gleeful passion. I almost felt physcially ill when any of their music confronted me but I was astonished how much I loved their 90's stuff. I've never really been able to get into any of the recent releases but my love for the 90's era made me look back at the early stuff and find the gold I was to biased and narrow minded to appreaciate before. Numb, Lemon and The Fly are some of my favourite pop tunes as a matter of fact.
Want to also own up to some Hold Me, Thrill me love as well.
Some.

Listening back to Achtung (stuff like The Fly in particular), I'm surprised how much of the sound was influenced by the British rock-dance hybrids of the time, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays, Stone Roses etc... Which is funny cause at the time I was mad about all those bands, but less about U2. Now I'm in my 'nostalgia rediscovery' of that period, maybe it's time to give Achtung and the others a worthy listen too.

I've never been much of a U2 fan but lately I've been listening to their late seventies/eariy eighties period and there's some seriously good stuff, Stories for Boys, Electric Co. Like a drowning man. "40", all really great, I'm up to Joshua Tree, I was never that big on their nineties output except for maybe one or two songs, I'll definitely be giving it a closer listen.

I'd recommend checking your chronology. It's somewhere between overstatement and completely incorrect to say that Echo and the Bunnymen or the Chameleons UK inspired or even "inspired" U2. They were rivals, maybe, but not exactly key mutual influences. All these bands came out around the same time, generally speaking. You can trace their collective roots back through Joy Division and Television, maybe, but it's patently ridiculous to imply that U2 were just some poseurs who were ripping off their now less well-known contemporaries. They were all just tiny bands with some ambition - U2 just happened to click. Probably because their scope was bigger, they evolved more drastically, and they simply wrote better songs. Ocean Rain's a great album, but the level of performance and songwriting pales in comparison to that of War or The Joshua Tree.

Where the heck is the Stones homage on Achtung? Is it because they use the phrase "Wild Horses?" And you're criticizing a band for borrowing from the king borrower of all time (maybe next to Madonna). Wow. I don't think Bowie's even all that big a component of the Achtung sound, but if he is, it's certainly the Berlin era stuff, which (shockingly) Eno helped create. You don't suppose that his production, rather than a lack of creativity on U2's part, might have some bearing on the similarity?

Even Depeche Mode thinks you're trying too hard.

I don't get it. I figured the rest of the post had to be satire, but this is basically true.

I'm a big fan of ZOOROPA. I think that album in its way was ahead of its time.

My favorite has always been Boy.

I like Zooropa better than Achtung and bailed on Pop as well. But Dave is absolutely correct that "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is really good.

Yeah, really one of the best songs to come out of a soundtrack. And it fit the movie so well too.

For The First Time may be one of my favourite songs of all time from nay band so it's nice to see Zooropa getting some love around here...

...and come the fuck on, if you don't get into Johnny Cash singing Bono's lyrics on The Wanderer, with falsetto Bono backing him up, I wonder if you can gleen any joy from anything.

That shit's untouchable

Nope here' s one more that loves that one. I actually like every song on the album and tend to listein to it straight through.

I've recently gone back to the pre-Actung Baby stuff and re-acquainting myself with U2

I think one reason for the reaction to Actung Baby and Zooropa was that U2 were really into projecting that "three chords and the Truth" image, then suddenly went into "silly" synth pop.

Last U2 CD I bought was "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" One great song and a lot of blah. Havn't tried any other recent stuff from them. Any recommendations?

That was the last album...