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75 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An overlooked masterpiece, December 17, 2004
Pop is definitely one of the top 3 U2 CDs for me. I was stunned when it was panned so harshly when it came out. I was revelling in the sound of the CD. NONE of the music is techno, not even mofo. For real techno music, find some Plaid or Orbital. Mofo has some industrial leanings, but it's basically a driving, rhythmic track which bursts with emotion. It is electronic in nature, but IMO, that doesn't make it techno.
This CD has what I consider to be the BEST U2 single ever, "If God Would Send His Angels". The remixed version on the single is a bit better than this album version, but the album version is no slouch.
Then you have Please with that glorious bassline and ominous sound and, what I think is hilarious, "The Playboy Mansion" which hauled out all the topical cheesy American society issues at that time.
There are some of U2's best melodies on this CD too--very very melodic CD including aforementioned "If God Will Send His Angels", "Please", and "Do You Feel Loved". This CD IS NOT EXPERIMENTAL. It is a good artistic statement by U2, but it is VERY listenable and deep nonetheless.
From the starting, accessible, track of Discoteque, on to "Do You Feel Loved", which is a real jam, through the closer of "Wake Up Dead Man", this is a GREAT POP/ROCK CD that was horribly and wrongly maligned for years. This CD is excellent.
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34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Horibly Underated, March 24, 2004
Most people write this album off as "U2 trying to be a techno band." This is a stupid statement, and if people saw beyond the marketing image of the album and listened to the actual music, they would realise that there is only one song that would really be called techno; track #3, "Mofo", and through the rest of the album it is really just rock with some electronic overlays for effect. Immediately after "Discoteque" and "Mofo", "Staring at the Sun" makes thing undeniably 'rock' and no one in their right mind would call it techno. Then it moves on to "If God Will Send His Angels", which is a new spin on their former more folk oriented style, and then as the album progresses it becomes gradually darker and more downbeat, from the agressive "Miami" to the melancholy "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" and the forlorn "Wake Up Dead Man".U2 had allready been using electronic elements in their music for years before "Pop", with albums like "Zooropa" and "Actung Baby". Producers like Flood and Brian Eno had helped them use these elements to give the music a more dramatic and intense edge, and in my opinion, it was really evolving U2's music and took it beyond the level of the feel good, folky, arena rock pop songs U2 became famous for in the late 80's, to make something more emotional and complex. This improvement really showed in Achtung Baby, and in Pop they pushed it further and created what I think is the album with the most emotional range and dramatic punch of U2's career. Unfortunately they decided to slap this "pop" "techno" "discotec" label and look on it, and suddenly everyone wrote U2 off as "selling out" when in reality fan favorites like The Joshua Tree were much more "pop" oriented. The whole "pop" image was probably meant as a sort of sarcastic parody of U2's own sucess, but the joke went right over the public's head and they suddenly saw U2 as "technopop eurotrash". Now, as a result, we have "All that you Can't Leave Behind" in which U2 recoils from the bad reception of "Pop" by merely rehashing the folky arena rock style that made them famous instead of actually trying to do something new and different. However, perceptive listeners with an open mind can be treated to one of the hidden gems of the popular music industry, and enjoy what is perhaps U2's best work. Give it a chance and you might like it...a lot.
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70 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
pop goes the U2 - and all of our expectations, December 5, 2004
I have heard people say that U2's peak extended from the Unforgettable Fire through the Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby (skipping over the grossly under-rated Rattle and Hum). But I am of a mind to believe that U2 hit a second peak, a trilogy of albums, from Achtung Baby through Zooropa to close with Pop.
Pop is the dirty uncle of the trilogy - the kind of relative the family would like to lock up and shut into a back room. Pop is the most difficult of all of U2's albumns - it is an album that sounds and feels like shattered glass, and its lyrical themes are unpleasant, revealing, and made of the kind of stuff we either want to flush down the toilet or paste on our locker doors as a kind of grotesque centerfold.
When U2 crafted Achtung Baby they entered onto a project and a journey that would take them into places that they would not have otherwise dreamed of. Leaving the Joshua Tree behind they submerged themselves in the dirt and mud and grit of humanity. The albumn Pop is the very bottom of that immersion in humanity.
It is broken and cold and sick. It is also hot and crazy and distrastously tinged with something that only seems like hope. The songs on this album stretch from the sublime to the grotesque and back again through the slimey or the desperate. On this albumn, Pop, the members of the band did something in sound and vision that was infinitely ahead of their time. But the sad news is that the times show no signs of trying to catch up. The whole Zoo-olgy is Christlike in the sense that U2 is willingly to drink from that ultimate cup the poor man from Nazareth drank from.
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