U2 on the horizon

Even though it's standard journalistic practice, I've never been too crazy about reviewing records before they come out -- especially the "big" ones. Whatever consumer-guide function reviews serve is strictly on the unknown stuff most people haven't heard. But in the case of U2's "No Line on the Horizon," everybody who cares has already heard it even though the "official" release date isn't until Tuesday.

So we've got a review in Sunday's paper, penned by our estimable correspondent Josh Love, who doesn't much care for it; and at the other end of the spectrum, Rolling Stone has already deemed "Horizon" a five-star classic. I'm somewhere in the middle, but that's not the point. The point is that U2 is one of those massive rock institutions whose music is difficult to consider in the abstract, before an audience gets to it. So there's just not that much to say about it yet.

In my case, I always seem to change my mind about U2's records over time. My initial take on 2000's "All That You Can't Leave Behind" was that it was pretty good, for a self-conscious attempt at a Return To Form; while 2004's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" made a far better first impression. And yet some of the songs from "ATYCLB" accounted for the highest of high points at the last U2 show I saw (2005 in Charlotte), while "HTDAAB" has not aged particularly well.

Maybe it's just because I'm slow in the uptake, but I do think U2 is a band whose music needs to be in the air a while before it can be properly assessed. Where it's possible and maybe even preferable to enjoy most bands privately, U2's brand of anthemic spectacle requires audience involvement before it resonates (at least for me). When it first came out, U2's 1991 signpost "Achtung Baby" bugged the living daylights out of me for a long, long time. It took hearing those songs in context for a couple of years -- "One" segued with R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" on the radio, for example -- to get me to come around on it.

So it will be with "Horizon," I suspect. Right now, I kind of hate the single while I like the album's overall feel. But ask me again in six months. Who knows, by then we might have a U2 stadium show to talk about.

ADDENDUM (3/2/09): For whatever it's worth, Pitchfork ain't too crazy about it, either.