Notes & Personnel Info |  | U2: The Edge (vocals, guitar, organ, keyboards); Bono (vocals, guitar); Adam Clayton (bass); Larry Mullen, Jr. (drums, percussion, programming). | | Additional personnel: Steve Osborne, Howie B., Flood, Marius De Vries (keyboards); Ben Hillier (programming). | | Engineers: Mark "Spike" Stent, Howie B., Alan Moulder. | | Recorded at South Beach Studios, Miami, Florida; Hanover, Windmill Lane Recording Studios and The Works, Dublin, Ireland. | | POP was nominated for a 1998 Grammy for Best Rock Album. | | Personnel: The Edge (vocals, guitar, organ, keyboards); Bono (vocals, guitar); Howie B (keyboards, turntables); Flood, Marius de Vries, Steve Osborne (keyboards); Adam Clayton (bass guitar); Larry Mullen, Jr. (percussion, programming, loops); Des Broadbery, Ben Hillier (programming). | | Audio Mixers: Flood; Howie B; Mark "Spike" Stent; Steve Osborne. | | Recording information: South Beach Studios, Miami, FL; Works, Dublin, Ireland. | | Photographers: Stephane Sednaoui; Anja Grabert; Nellee Hooper; Anton Corbijn. | | Unknown Contributor Roles: Howie B; Larry Mullen, Jr. | | No matter which way you look at it, Pop doesn't have the same shock of the new that Achtung Baby delivered on first listen. Less experimental and more song-oriented than Zooropa, Pop attempts to sell the glitzy rush of techno to an audience weaned on arena rock. And that audience includes U2 themselves. While they never sound like they don't believe in what they're doing, they still remove most of the radical elements of electronic dance, which is evident to anyone with just a passing knowledge of the Chemical Brothers and Underworld. To a new listener, Pop has flashes of surprise -- particularly on the rampaging "Mofo" -- but underneath the surface, U2 rely on anthemic rockers and ballads. "Discotheque" might be a little clumsy, but "Staring at the Sun" shimmers with synthesizers borrowed from Massive Attack and a Noel Gallagher chorus. Similarly, "Do You Feel Loved" and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" fuse old-fashioned U2 dynamism with a keen sense of the cool eroticism that makes trip-hop so alluring. Problems arise when the group tries to go for conventional rock songs, some of which are symptomatic of the return of U2's crusade for salvation. Pop is inflected with the desire for a higher power to save the world from its jaded spiral of decay and immorality, which is why the group's embrace of dance music never seems joyous -- instead of providing an intoxicating rush of gloss and glamour, it functions as a backdrop for a plea of salvation. Achtung Baby also was a comment on the numbing isolation of modern culture, but it made sweeping statements through personal observations; Pop makes sweeping statements through sweeping observations. The difference is what makes Pop an easy record to admire, but a hard one to love. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine | | Like much pop music in the mid-1990s, POP is cobbled together out of buzzy synthesizers and reverberant keyboards, techno drum loops and funky live drums, guitars distorted into clouds of metal, vocals you sometimes have to work to hear, and songs that seek God and sex and other important stuff in the world's trash heaps. And it's obsessed, more than anything else, with pop itself. At its most frisky, as on the dance-club single "Discotheque," POP sounds like Oasis backed by the Chemical Brothers (see that combo's recent single "Setting Sun" for comparison). Drop the club beat and add a bright acoustic guitar, as on "Staring At The Sun," and POP sounds like, well, Oasis. | | This is the kind of future-pop U2 introduced on its watershed 1991 album ACHTUNG, BABY, and POP completes a sort of trilogy. Whereas 1993's ZOOROPA played up the "art" side of this experiment, POP, which finds art-rock influence Brian Eno gone from the producer's seat and techno wiz kid Howie B. taking up some of his space, plays up the pop side. It's the most playful album U2 has ever made, with grooves made for dancing, not thinking, and melodies that explode in your face like bubblegum. Lyrically, U2 is still looking for what it hasn't found, in such places as nouveau-riche "Miami" and the celebrity trash receptacle that is "The Playboy Mansion." Musically, though, U2 seems to have found it, in the simple, ecstatic click of a dance beat. |
Producer: Flood; Howie B.; Steve Osborne |
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| Rolling Stone (3/20/97, pp.81-83)
- 4 Stars (out of 5)
- "...a record whose rhythms, textures and visceral guitar mayhem make for a thrilling roller-coaster ride, one whose sheer inventiveness is plainly bolstered by the heavy involvement of techno/trip-hop wizard Howie B..."Spin (4/97, p.153)
- 9 (out of 10)
- "...No, U2 haven't crafted a garden of hooks....Rather, they've turned a slightly cold eye to an uncertain, end-of-the-century moment, when dueling genres often can't pronounce each other's names, everyone dances to techno-inspired stuff by night, and no one remembers what constitutes a pop hit..." Entertainment Weekly (3/7/97, pp.62-64)
- "...Despite its glittery launch, the album is neither trashy nor kitschy, nor is it junky-fun dance music. It incorporates bits of the new technology--a high-pitched siren squeal here, a sound-collage splatter there--but it is still very much a U2 album..." - Rating: B Q (1/98, p.115)
- Included in Q Magazine's "50 Best Albums of 1997." Village Voice (2/24/98)
- Ranked #31 in the Village Voice's 1997 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll. |
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