U2 is back ... sort of.
It's been three years since the band last put out an album, and the anticipation for the follow-up to "Pop" is getting a bit ridiculous. 1998's "Best of 1980-1990" was a great collection to tide over fans, but most of the songs already had been heard. Bono and/or U2 returns with several of the 16 tracks from the soundtrack to "The Million Dollar Hotel," an upcoming film by Wim Wenders with a story co-written by Bono.
And though Bono has been stretching his writing prowess into the film genre, the soundtrack suggests he's nowhere near abandoning the thing he and his buddies do best: music.
The album kicks off with "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," the title of Salman Rushdie's 1999 novel, but the tune's exquisite lyrics unfortunately cannot be attributed to Bono. Rushdie wrote the words as a poem in his book and allowed U2 to record it.
And like Rushdie's writing, the piece is sweeping, passionate and beautiful. Bono channels Rushdie's voice as a writer transforming it into sweet song. Take, for instance, the amazing lyric "for what I worshipped stole my love away / it was the ground beneath her feet," and allow me to elucidate. In Rushdie's novel, the female protagonist dies in an earthquake. Reread the lyric. Bono reads into the stunning juxtaposition of worshipping, quite literally, the ground a woman walks upon, the ability of that very thing to swallow her up, and he turns it into a vocally phenomenal tragedy. He brings forth Rushdie's sense of uncertainty in everything but love and, with the aid of the best band in the business, carries the emotion extraordinarily.
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But the opening track isn't the disc's only gem. "Never Let Me Go," attributed to Bono and the MDH Band, has a slow, quiet texture that is both brooding and expressive. The floating trumpet of Jon Hassell complements vocals which are contemplative and confident.
On "Stateless," U2 returns as a whole, and the results are remarkable. The tune's mood is spacious and sonic --a signature of producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Bono meditatively croons "I've got no home in this world / Just you / And you are not mine," you almost expect him to finish the song with "the lengths that I will go to, the distance in your eyes." It sounds so much like Michael Stipe in "Losing My Religion" - which frankly, fits appropriately. Much of U2's work confronts that ever-present who's-in-charge-of-it-all question, and on this soundtrack, it's all over the place: "Never Let You Go," "Falling at Your Feet" and "The First Time," which comes from U2's 1993 "Zooropa."
The other cuts on the collection, however, pale in comparison with the Bono/U2 tracks. A Spanish version of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." is funny but forgettable. Additionally, Milla Jovavich performs not one, not two, but, count 'em, three pretty poor versions of Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love." The film's star begins in a quiet, soft-spoken, beautiful way at first, only to choke later. Too bad Bono didn't steal the microphone away.
Regardless of such mediocrity on the part of others, the soundtrack is a satisfying antidote to the serious lack of U2 that lately has plagued the record store racks.
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