Achtung Baby

The album continues, with not a single moment letting it down. The Fly and Mysterious Ways are two further highlights, but really this whole album is a joy and a pleasure. They invented irony in music, and this album shows it off. There's a full spectrum of slow and fast songs, quiet and loud; a wonderfully diverse album.

This album has not dated in 9 years, and possibly never will. It's U2's best album, and one of the best albums ever written. Make sure you listen to it sometime.

And if you want more, try the Zoo TV video - an audio-visual spectacular...

Like those works, Achtung Baby is an intoxicating listen from beginning to end... figuring as both a culmination of the band's disparate musical influences, and as a document to the kind of counter-culture explosion happening at the time. It's also a bitter and painfully observed certification of the divorce of the band's guitarist, the Edge... with Bono ably ploughing the kind of brokenhearted malaise so perfectly captured by people like Thom Yorke, Michael Stipe and Mark Hollis. Elsewhere, the swirling dance-beats, and references to Madchester's baggy scene had already been developed on classic single The Fly, and now can be seen to a greater extent on the wonderful opening number Zoo Station.

Bono sets a tone for the album right from the start with his vocals incorporating both whispers and screams to great effect, whilst the inclusion of orgasmic yelps and much distortion only helps to highlight the seedy, metropolitan atmosphere of the track. The grungy, distorted sound of Zoo Station leads us nicely into another big single of the time, Even Better than the Real Thing, in which the Edge is allowed to take his guitar playing to strange and decidedly funky new levels, to create a piece of music that isn't a million miles away from the Happy Mondays circa Pills Thrills and Bellyaches. Yet another hit single, One is a change of pace... a beautiful acoustic ballad that I'm sure the majority of people are already familiar with from the heyday of ZOO/MTV.

The detached and emotionally wavering sound continues through such classics as, Until the End of the World, Who's Gonn'a Ride Your Wild Horses and So Cruel... all mirroring the kind of music going on around then, but also conveying enough of the old U2 magic to make for a seriously enjoyable listen. Meanwhile, later tracks such as the aforementioned Fly, Mysterious Ways (sort of like Depeche Mode around the time of the Violator LP) and Trying to Throw You're Arms Around the World all benefit greatly from the trademark U2 rhythm section, and Eno's other-worldly production (drawing parallels with both Acid House, and the landmark records he created with Bowie; Station to Station, Low, Heroes etc).

The three closing tracks are all beautifully epic, bringing to the piece a sense of melancholic desperation, but at the same time, a moment of transcendence. This is really for me, U2's masterpiece album, up there with War, which is another perennial favourite. Here the band got the blend between psychedelic experimentation and real music spot on, with none of the rambling pontificating of the later, though admittedly interesting, Zooropa. Still, a step up from the tired trad tedium of Rattle and Hum, this is an album that pushes the limits of musical reinvention as well as pushing all the right buttons... quite simply, a precursor to things like Radiohead's OK Computer, and a perfect rock record in it's own right.