Album misses target, 'dismantles' U2

I am trying and failing to like the new U2. It's not that it's lost its touch; in fact, I would venture that 2000's inconsistent and aggravating All That You Can't Leave Behind contained one of its best songs ever -- "Beautiful Day." However, it's not even trying to be the band that wrote songs like "The Electric Co.," "Bad," "In God's Country" or even "Until the End of the World." Where there was once a child's-eye view of a world gone awry, you have a crapload of smirking irony and a lot of unremarkable music.\nIt's no wonder that its music reflects this - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb starts with the agonizingly catchy "Vertigo" and meanders through painfully shlocky and forgettable ballads. "Vertigo," like "Beautiful Day" before it, presents a glossier U2 sound and draws you in at the moments (the interlude before the last chorus, for example) where it sounds like it could be the same band. Steve Lillywhite's production used to be fresh and exhilarating -- he pioneered the can-you-get-any-more-treble-heavy sound that helped U2 so immensely -- but now he seems to be making them as studio slick and inhuman as possible.\n"Love and Peace or Else" has a stripped-down, bass-heavy sound that seems surprising chilly, but it massacres its subtlety with lyrics like "We need love and peace/lay down your guns" and "Where is the love?" "Miracle Drug" is a ballad in the same vein as "Walk On," except with gems like "Freedom has a scent/like the top of a newborn baby's head." It's only "City of Blinding Lights" that makes this album worthwhile -- it's one of the only sonically pleasing tracks that seems heartfelt on an album that's supposed to be dripping with intimate sentiments.\nU2 spent the majority of the '90s trying to ham up self-parody and reinvent itself, but I get the impression that in the course of being Zooropa's Eurodance anti-heroes or pop's post-modern Village People, it lost the sensitivity and shameless introspection that made it the best band of the 1980s. It was four wide-eyed kids from Dublin that made albums like War and The Joshua Tree, and it was four self-revealing adults that made Achtung Baby, one of the best albums of the '90s. Now it's three uninventive burnouts and one painfully ubiquitous jerkoff making inconsistent, watered-down easy listening rock to coddle our post-Sept. 11 souls.\nU2 erupted in an era when formulaic, shrink-wrapped rock like Boston was the order of the day. Eleven albums and counting, it's built an enormous and gaudy monument to spite its prior victories; one wishes the atomic bomb would just detonate already and get it over with.