Tear Down The Walls - #16: U2 - The Joshua Tree

Good afternoon reader. I have a confession to make.
When I discovered that I had a ticket to this year's festival, U2 popped straight to mind. Back story - Bono and his bunch of Irish merry men were meant to be performing last year, but pulled out due to the singer's back problems, leaving us with the frankly piss poor replacement Gorillaz.
However, they are going to be there this time, and are therefore part of the Challenge.
Admittedly, I'm not the world's biggest fan of the band, but thankfully, I know someone who loves 'em. Someone who could actually do this album justice, and write about it as if it is one of the greatest albums ever made, as it probably is. For me, I can take it or leave it - but for my guest reviewer it's a bit special. 
So this is my confession – I have bent the rules of the challenge, and drafted in a ringer, as it were... I hope you enjoy his dissection of what is undoubtably Bono and his boys' finest hour. I will be back from tomorrow to guide you through the 44 albums left on our list, but for now, I'll leave you in the capable hands of a man who knows his stuff... 
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Steven T. Askew...



If ever there was an album that sounded better on vinyl than CD, it is U2’s The Joshua Tree. The sense of openness, of space and air and sky, deliberately implied in the record’s production simply cannot be replicated by the number-crunching constraints of a condensing and edge-flattening digital format.

It still sounds good on CD and, doubtlessly, through iTunes – that’s the strength of the songs – but modern formats have compressed everything to the interior. Current technologies just cannot replicate the vinyl – that massive “might burst at the seams” exterior-rush of Where The Streets Have No Name. Built for the open – Glastonbury, get ready – the album opener expands from a majestic keyboard introduction with glistening layers of chiming guitars, then kicks in with skittering toms, a four-to-the-floor bass drum and proto-techno bassline.

The music is on dramatically tight and tense reins, threatening to snap free and go off in any direction at any moment as it surges inexorably forward like an adrenalin rush. Bono's primal howl calls out into the wind like an on-the-prowl beast raging against the unknown.

Boxed-in frustration, ecstatic epiphany. Limitless possibilities. That has always been U2’s trick – one they mastered, honed and refined on this album.

It can’t be understated that this record was born from a difficult time for the band, unsettled by their performance at 1985’s Live Aid (where, to the outside world they were amongst the handful of acts that ‘stole the show’, but within their own camp were convinced they had ‘completely blown it’). The Joshua Tree is, arguably, the sound of a band only recently aware of what they actually are and, having discovered it is confusingly not quite what they thought, questioning their relevance, questioning whether they actually had anything worthwhile to give. It sees them driving themselves much harder than they need have done to become something bigger, bolder and better than before. As if accepting what you are, standing still, means turning to stone. Or the Rolling Stones.

The Joshua Tree is a record built by a hardworking, twitchingly ambitious band trying to achieve something over-and-above the public’s expectation of them – but it is no mere rebranding exercise. It’s admirably, selfishly, shiftingly artistic. It’s the sound of a band trying to confound themselves, willing themselves to say something more with what they’ve discovered they’ve got, pushing to elevate themselves as auters, striving single-mindedly to stand among the greats.

The band pushed the sonic experimentation of their previous album The Unforgettable Fire. Producer Brian Eno’s quirkily different take on the world both educated and challenged U2 – and he continued to nurture fresh and invigorating attitudes to songwriting and recording in them, encouraging new ways for the group to think outside the sturdy and efficiently dynamic post-punk powerhouse they had constructed. Tear down the walls, indeed.

Eno's intellectual approach complemented the band's more visceral songwriting, his technical expertise and intellectual depth enabling their discovery and exploration of previously uncharted sonic territory. Newer, gentler, cleverer, harder, wilder, nobler textures abound. 

Eno pointed each of them out to view the horizon, and facilitated the outer edges of their imagination. His curious aesthetic offered the band the opportunity to stop scrawling on the walls of their writing-room with rudimentary-but-effective one-colour wax crayons, and begin painting the broad widescreen technicolour vistas they envisaged.

The Joshua Tree, exuberant and restrained in all the right places and washed in faint nuances of Americana, was firmly brushed in sepia of course – a stylistic choice – but, my God, it’s a rich, immersive and expansive experience.

Pretentiously ambitious and artistically arrogant? Perhaps. But, listening back almost a quarter-of-a-century on, The Joshua Tree still sounds like the most remarkable success on all fronts – the sound of a band kicking down the doors of preconception.

Sure, it takes itself seriously and can be a touch po-faced at times – but forgive and forget that earnestness. The Joshua Tree rages, it rues, it romances. It's reflective. It’s restless, listless, literary. The youthful angst of their previous albums is replaced with a burgeoning maturity, a recognition that enlightenment almost always never comes but that the search must always continue. It's a spiritually unsatisfied – but not unsatisfying – record. The essential 'struggle' of U2, the rage at injustice, is still there but the sloganeering (not that it was ever mere posturing) has been deliberately muted, a deeper, more entrenched, worldview taking root. From Boy to man in only four albums. This is the most poetic record, the defining artistic statement, of the 1980s. And, probably, the greatest achievement in U2’s career.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For – a roughly hewn and utterly gorgeous attempt at a new type of gospel music – yearns to find the higher ground, the homeland, the heart of our matter. Anyone who ever doubts Bono’s motives or authenticity should listen to his voice in this humbling and restless push for meaning and purpose. Straining right up against the very top end of his register, it is utterly compelling. Not the sound of a man who ever fakes it or opts for the easy path.

Lead-off single With Or Without You sits comfortably amongst the ‘classic’ songs of all time, and will be familiar to anyone with a radio. But let’s think about it from a side-angle for a moment - what an achievement, for a quirky little song about longing, with little more than a tumbling drum machine beat, a plodding underpin bassline, a sci-fi guitar shimmer, and only four chords. It’s a masterclass in ache, control and release – and, if you’re in ‘that’ mood, it can both collapse and heal the heart.

Running To Stand Still, a reflective comment on heroin abuse amongst the high-towers of estate Dublin, is mournful, resigned, celebratory and defiant all at the same time. In God’s Country is as evocative a lovesong to the American dustbowl as you could wish to hear, with acoustic guitars and The Edge’s trademark bell-like arpeggios fluttering around each other.

One Tree Hill is a heartbreaking – but ultimately uplifting – hymn, dedicated to the memory of Bono’s personal assistant Greg Carroll, who died in a road accident during the album’s recording. One man’s small shadow against the grand scheme of things is utterly acknowledged – with caveats… The capability of a man to be a huge part of those he touches, however brief those moments, throughout his physical life is a theme the band would explore in more explicit and active fashion with the 1991 stadium-pleasing single One. Here, though, the spirituality of that notion is expressed in romantically impressionistic poetry. Personal grief never sounded so blurrily poignant, comfortingly beautiful or optimistically universal.   

The original name for The Joshua Tree album was The Two Americas. Very U2 – to examine the grime and underbelly of life alongside the grandeur. Standing amidst the epic red-rock desert vistas they conjure on this record, they are not content to be mere tourists. They simultaneously stare out to the grandeur of the sun on the skyline and turn over the nearest rock for a close look at the darkness, the dampness – and to poke at the insects.

Mothers Of The Disappeared and Bullet The Blue Sky paint a very different portrait of the country than the smitten In God’s Country. They deal with areas of American history that are difficult to stomach.

Sonically, Bullet The Blue Sky captures the hell of El Salvador, Vietnam et al – blood, guts, grime, death, destruction, degradation, defiance. Poundingly huge Led Zeppelin drums strong-arm Adam Clayton’s relentlessly warlike bass as it throbs underneath, and the chaos and confusion of The Edge’s fighter-plane guitar work rips devastating holes in the skyline. Over this maelstrom, Bono – for the first time really pushing himself to achieve an album of coherent and tonally connected lyrics – exorcises his inner beat-poet. It’s a remarkable piece of work. In their own canon, the vicious and vivid wordplay knocks the tabloid-headline pitched outrage of Sunday Bloody Sunday into a cocked cowboy hat.

The Joshua Tree is a grown-up record of adult extremes. It’s a record of experiments. It’s a record of achievements. Sometimes naive, often wise. All human life is here.

The fact that the record falls just the smallest distance short of transcendance is, paradoxically, a large part of what makes it utterly transcendant. Despite its flaws, it's jaw-droppingly mesmerising in its strive and ambition, astoundingly good at capturing the physical places it attempts to position itself in, and breathtaking in the way it speaks of the human condition in terms that are accessible and easily understandable whilst also seeming arcane and almost unreachable. That openness, space, air and sky I mentioned earlier is truly crucial – but, in the end, utterly secondary to the sheer heart of it all.

An unsettled but questing U2 had the surety of purpose and scale of ambition to push themselves onwards as far as they could, and the magical alchemy conjured by The Joshua Tree continues to pay undiminished cathedral-sized dividends for listeners almost 25 years after release.

For a band sometimes accused of having Godlike pretentions, that they incidentally wrote what became their own Bible during a period of existential meltdown and spiritual regeneration is one of music’s most worthwhile and rewarding ironies.