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U2’s No Line on the Horizon has been released to critical acclaim, and while it has been earlier reported that this album was supposed to be experimental, relative to the band’s last two studio albums, All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and with the coming on-board of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno – both experimental producers par excellence – this record did not turn out to be entirely experimental.The production history of the album reveals some interesting threads. Coming from Achtung Baby and Zooropa, and transitionally through Pop, the last two records of U2 before No Line on the Horizon have been driven by stripped-down rock, ushered in by the trio of songs – which I personally feel are yet to be achieved again – “Beautiful Day,” “Elevation,” and “Walk On.” In these two records U2 simultaneously made their music and image accessible again, at the same time, quite elevated into instant classics, now impossible to parallel. It’s as if they have aged; they have arrived in some place where there is no longer any backdoor; and they are neither going to be young again coming out the front door to surprise us nor precarious underground artists trying to break open some window or wall to create new entrances or exits.
U2 was originally at work on the new record with Rick Rubin, famed for his label American Recordings, who was earlier reported to have urged the band to go “back to basics.” Rubin had successfully produced Johnny Cash in his “back to basics” American Recordings, making him once again relevant to the young, by, ironically, highlighting what Cash was – that is, old and therefore legendary. In retrospect, musically, this seems no longer possible for U2, or if it were, it would prove to be a digression; at least for now that they ain’t anywhere, literally, near their graves. All That You Can’t Leave Behind is as basic as it could get for these guys, and they had to move on from there.
But where?
The exit of Rubin and the entrance of Eno and Lanois provided a glimpse of this would-be direction forward. Lanois had been a constant collaborator, producing U2’s now classic early works, The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. Lanois seems to have provided a kind of musical continuity in these two albums, in such preoccupations with certain types of reverberating sounds and round tones. A musical quality in these albums is also somehow felt in Lanois’ production of Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy, which of Dylan’s records of that period, production-wise, sounds more like U2 than Dylan. Lanois was also with U2 when they went experimental berserk, producing Achtung Baby, and with the band when they returned ‘home,’ producing the last two records, All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. (Incidentally, he was also with Bob Dylan when he returned [or was it left, yet again?] ‘home,’ with Time Out of Mind, which many critics characteristically described as ‘ghostly’ – which is a Lanois trademark.). So, in more ways than one, U2 with Lanois is another homecoming.
Lanois in the 1980s also produced the music of Horizon’s co-producer, Brian Eno, specifically Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, The Pearl, and Thursday Afternoon. Eno himself is known for his landmark musical experiments, as synthesizer player of Roxy Music, as solo ‘inventor’ of wildly original ethereal music, and as record producer.
The most interesting thing about U2’s No Line on the Horizon, in fact, is that we never hear the ghostly and the ethereal in the foreground, as we would expect after reading the producers’ names and reading that U2 was going experimental again – though it looms in the background and it blankets all spaces in between silences and phrases.
There were some exciting anecdotes about how the band did live recording and kept many first takes. This ensured a kind of raw music that was most certainly U2, and what had been added or what influence came in compositionally and production wise through Lanois and Eno was tempered by these liberating recording decisions. We hear in the songs both the experiments in scales and progressions of The Edge and Adam Clayton, which in themselves evade untrained ears, and the echoes, reverbs, and delays of the ambience devised by Lanois and Eno. The recording process ensured that performance took precedence.
Also, a part of the album was reportedly recorded in the context of Bono’s participation in the Festival of World Sacred Music, and this provides another clue to how the record would eventually sound. The experiment then is in keeping with the band’s musical (and lyrical) trajectory. It does not digress coming from the last two records, and neither does it retreat. In many ways this is the logical next-album after How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The stripped-down, the ghostly, the ethereal, the raw, the sacred, brought in by the quartet and the duo – these all bloomed and turned into the record which we now have.
