Pitchfork

The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind" implies facing up to their platinum salad days of the Edge's trademark echo shimmers and Paul "Bono Vox" Hewson's Lexus-honk vocals. For the general public, the title reifies our struggle to leave behind the image of Bono hatching from a disco lemon, dressed in that rayon six-pack t-shirt. For a band settled into four-letter pseudonyms from their 1980 debut, breaking up never seemed like an option. From day one, U2 was a rock constellation-- a warplane-- and we expected epics. It's an early affair, a hazy infatuation, that has since bloated into comfortable taking-for-granted. As with all ubiquitous products, the familiarity of logos, slogans, and icons eventually supplants whatever original feelings we may have had.

U2 are, indeed, a universal product, much like the Catholic Church Bono humbly admires. The swoosh on The Edge's skully cap, and the golden arches of Bono's glasses spring to mind. Song titles and lyrics on All That boldly declare familiar, safe dogma and generic commandments, such as "Grace", "Peace on Earth", "I believe in you," "Won't you take me, take me please," "I know it aches, and your heart breaks," etc. This new batch of songs heralds a conscious and welcome revocation of dance-inflected bubbleglam, but scales back too far. In searching so hard for their souls, U2 have hacked away their flesh and skull, leaving a lobotomized approximation of glory.

"Beautiful Day" opens with bombast after a cheeky keyboard tease, and peaks with Bono's cracking voice in the shouted coda: "What you don't have/ You don't need it now!" And so the album climaxes at 3\xBD minutes. The gospel ballad, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", maintains the buzz admirably, again peaking in the coda with Brian Eno's faux-brass keyboard belts. Elsewhere, Eno's fingerprints remain undusted. The album could have benefited from more of him; apparently, it takes Brian Eno + Berlin to = renaissance.

"Elevation" slaughters hope with reckless chops of the hackneyed sword, as Bono commits songwriting faux pas #1: rhyming "sky" with "fly" and "high." The details will be spared, but you can work it out. Damn you, God and aerodynamics, for making altitude a necessity for flight, in the sky, which happens to be above us. As the album's sticker proclaims, "Walk On" is locked and loaded as the second single. Epic midtempo should always follow punchy power-rock, you see. Nice, but unexciting. Here, Bono seems dead set on ruining U2's return with clichés. Minutes after the aforementioned poetic gaffe, he returns with, "A singing bird in a cage/ Who will only fly/ Fly for freedom." That little bird is you, guys! Free yourself from your cage! For freedom!

The record stomps around in this valley before mounting another two-song peak with "In a Little While" and "Wild Honey". On the former, the vulnerability of Bono's "vox" makes a welcome return from minute 3:30 to inject some heartfelt emotion into the tingling doo-wop. "That girl!/ That girl!/ She's mine," Bono bellows with larynx scratches, evoking the dead spirit of Van Morrison. "Wild Honey" similarly ob-la-dis like a giddy Van, and somehow escapes the shame of Bono declaring, "I was a monkey." Testament to the band there.

But it's back into the dark nadir until the album's closer. Bono joins hands with Sinéad O'Connor in healing the world on the tepid carol, "Peace on Earth". "Jesus, can you take the time/ To throw a drowning man a line," Bono asks. Hey, if the world is so dark, take off your sunglasses. Bono's Healing Heart takes a "look at the world" on the next track, and discovers that people "feel all kinds of things." Indeed.

But not even Tom Waits' grizzled pipes could salvage the atrocity of "New York". Over one of the best musical beds he's ever been offered, Bono weaves a Hallmark lover's tale, in the city where "Irish, Italians/ Jews, and Hispanics/ Religious nuts [and] political fanatics/ [Stir] in the stew/ Happily/ Not like me and you." Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album-- one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics. Beautiful day, certainly, but the rest of the week was all jetlag and rain. Can't The Edge sing, too?