Album of the Week: U2 — Achtung Baby

In 1990 U2 were at an impasse. They had somehow managed to become the biggest rock band in the world following the success of the gospel-tinged widescreen sounds of The Joshua Tree, but following the quick release of a American heartland focused follow-up, Rattle and Hum, they were met with accusations of being pretentious, self-righteous and over-serious (slights which have followed around their career since). Viewing Rattle and Hum as a misguided deviation, the band decided to get back on the path and record their next album in Berlin at the famous Hansa recording studios by the wall.

Arriving on the eve of German reunification the band found themselves alone in a uncertain city and at odds with each other over the direction of the music. The rhythm section of Larry Mullin and Adam Clayton felt they should develop the straight ahead cinematic rock they had pioneered on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, while Bono and guitarist the edge were finding inspiration in industrial music, club sounds, and the noisier ends of punk rock. The sessions eventually were put on hold, leaving the future of the band in question.

By all accounts, it was famedproducer and frequent collaborator Brian Eno who was able to demonstrate to the band that the pull in different directions was not necessarily negative, and that it could be possible to combine the disparate directions the band was heading in to perhaps end up in a place that was new and exciting. The writing of the song “One” was a catalyst, energizing the band and leading them to recommit to the sessions and the future when they resumed recording at home in Dublin some months later.

Achtung Baby is one of those rare records that not every band is able to make. It marks a point where an already hugely successful, popular act is able to strike out into new — even highly experimental — territory, make something different and interesting, and maintain their level in the culture, if not surpass it. Other examples of this would be The Beatles with Sgt. Pepper, Radiohead on Kid A, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Bob Dylan’s electric trilogy. In some cases, the albums are viewed with confusion upon their release but looked upon more fondly over time. Achtung Baby bucked this trend and was a massive critical success at the time, and while it didn’t chart quite as high as The Joshua Tree, it still did well, and the subsequent Zoo TV tour, an ironically postured multimedia extravaganza, set a new standard in the band’s already significant reputation in terms of live performance, utilizing technology to provide an incredible sense of conceptual theater that remains influential on the stadium concert circuit to this day.

The biggest change in the sound for the band was a movement toward more heavily textured soundscapes that could at times feel angular and chaotic through a use of more aggressive guitar playing, feedback, and a wider variety of effects combined with layers of sound from other sources. When the recording process was near complete, the band had amassed such a huge amount of recorded tracks and overdubs that Brian Eno was again tasked with “saving the album” by paring it down to its more essential characteristics. For the most part the band still managed to maintain the structural elements of their past work, perhaps most notably on the ballad-oriented songs, but Achtung Baby’s overall darker energy and noisier aesthetic, the vibe of which was most perhaps most memorably captured on the single “The Fly,” the song that also served to inspire Bono’s character of the same name that he adopted during the Zoo TV tour.

Of course, a band can never help sounding like themselves to some degree, and the real marvel of Achtung Baby is how much U2 was able to bring what they were into a fresh musical context without completely alienating one that they had spent years establishing — an achievement, it could be argued, that they would always struggle to recapture from that moment onward. It’s also a rare feat that any musical artist make an album where nearly every single song is it’s own beast, and could easily rank among the bands classics, while fitting together as a unified whole. Given that, it’s unsurprising that Achtung Baby would prove to be a bar that would be incredibly difficult for U2 to reach, let alone surpass, again.

(Hey everyone — this the first edition of a series I'd like to do pretty well every week for the foreseeable future. I hope people will hop on board and enjoy them. I'm gonna try and tackle a range of albums I think are great and interesting, probably mostly staying out of the obvious "classic" albums and stuff that would have been in the Top 40, but they'll show up from time to time too. I'd encourage people to leave feedback and thoughts on the album profiled, the band, etc. Memories, opinions, whatever! Music discussions are some of the best out there so I hope to hear from you.)