I had planned to do a retrospecticus in preparation for U2’s new album, No Line On the Horizon, but I’ve just been a little too busy lately so I guess this’ll have to do.
After a few years of playing gigs and recording a few singles in and around Dublin, U2 released their debut album, Boy. The album demonstrates their early post-punk sound while also showing them to be a band with a simple, but enormous sound that was destined to fill stadiums.
A lot of what gave U2 a unique sound early on was The Edge’s chiming, echo-laden guitar melodies. And though Bono’s lyrics weren’t terribly inspired on this album, his delivery has an incredible energy to at as he belts out songs like “An Cat Dubh” and “A Day Without Me” in an impressively high register.
Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton also display their ability to interlock rhythm and melody excellently. Boy shows a rougher, unpolished U2, still years away from achieving success in America, but Boy did provide them with their first UK hit, “I Will Follow”. It’s certainly not their best album, but it’s still one that established them as a force to be reconned with, and it displays that signature bare-bones U2 sound that they’ve been revisiting on their more recent albums.
Favorite Tracks: “I Will Follow”, “An Cat Dubh”, “The Electric Co.”
You can expect to see a review from me of U2’s new album within a couple days, I just picked it up a few hours ago. And oddly enough when I went to go pick it up at Virgin Megastore there was a local U2 tribute band that played a few songs in honor of the album’s release. They were alright I guess, but it was kind of annoying watching the lead singer trying to act like Bono, I couldn’t tell if he was actually Irish or just trying to seem authentic by talking with an accent.