U2: Songs of Experience review – fantastic return to form | Alexis Petridis' album of the week

Three years and nine producers in the making, U2 unveil an album full of self-awareness, gravitas and humour – and enough great moments to forgive its clumsier touches

Last summer U2 toured the world, triumphantly performing 1987’s The Joshua Tree in full for the first time. Bono and the Edge made rather a song and dance about this not being a nostalgic event, but there was little doubt that the shows felt redolent of a lost era, when U2 made their unlikely passage from awkward post-punk also-rans to the biggest band in the world seem weirdly effortless. Of course, hard work was put in along the way, but U2 always gave off the sense that destiny was somehow involved in their ascent, that a grandiose masterplan was working out exactly. That was one of the things about them that seemed to annoy people so much.

Those people can obviously find umpteen other things about the band to annoy them these days, but not that. Of the many charges you could file against U2 in their later years, making it look too easy is not among them. They’ve spent much of the last decade carrying on as if they didn’t really know what they wanted to be, or if they did know – The Biggest Band in the World again – how to go about being it. Cue confused albums – No Line on the Horizon, Songs of Innocence – and ungainly PR disasters: the most polite thing you can say about getting iTunes to automatically distribute Songs of Innocence to its users is that it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2AKw8Tf